Forging neurodivergent leadership

Shawn Johnston 00:00

Learning and growing is the point of what we're doing. It's the process of becoming, that never really ends.If you want to be a leader of well-rounded humans with feelings, good days and bad days, that need to work together, so that you can make money, you have to invest in your own emotional intelligence. If you think you're perfect and there's nothing to fix, there's nothing to work on, then just don't do it. It's just, it's not going to work for you. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 00:32

Welcome to High Agency, igniting conversations with inspiring people leading transformative change. Today, we're joined by someone who knows this terrain intimately. Shawn Johnston has transformed his own neurodivergent experience into revolutionary solutions for creative agencies that are facing burnout and chaos. Shawn is the founder of Refoundry, a revolutionary low-code site builder for WordPress agencies. And after 13 years running Forge and Smith and delivering over 500 websites, he's transformed hard-won lessons about burnout and broken processes into a game-changing solution. His platform empowers agencies to cut their build times by up to 70% while maintaining quality. And as a neurodivergent entrepreneur, Shawn championed systems that eliminate bottlenecks and chaos, helping creative teams scale sustainably. He's passionate about revolutionizing how agencies deliver web projects without burning out developers or compromising client expectations.Welcome, Shawn. 

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Shawn Johnston 01:40

Thank you for having me. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 01:41

Yeah, thanks for joining us. I'm obviously very interested in your journey as a leader and as an agency founder. You started Forge and Smith at about the same time that we started Skyrocket. 

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Shawn Johnston 01:53

That's right. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 01:54

I think you learned some lessons about leadership and improving systems and processes far earlier than I did. And that's, I think, a big part of my curiosity about how you kind of arrived to where you did. But before we get into all that, how did your agency start and why did you start the agency? 

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Shawn Johnston 02:18

Yeah, I mean, that agency sort of grew out of my freelance career, and I actually sort of branched out on my own during the great recession of the early 2000s when the whole housing bubble collapsed. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 02:32

It was around 2008. 

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Shawn Johnston 02:33

Yeah, there you go. And then, yeah, so the agency I was working at the time folded, and I had been doing just some side hustle work, and I decided to jump all the way in. So it was a lot of Craigslist hustle. I was in $1,500 WordPress sites. I really enjoyed it. But yeah, just sort of scaled from there, and yeah, things started to take off, and I had to start employing people, and I couldn't give them a ShawnJohnson.ca email address, so I came up with Forge and Smith, and we've been around ever since.Why I went out on my own? I spent eight or nine years at a corporate head office for a national electronics retailer. That will remain unnamed. But I don't know. I saw the benefit of process and frameworks, but I just didn't never agreed with the ones I was being forced to work within. They just didn't, and I had no control to be able to shape them. I just had to work in unnatural ways for myself. So going out on my own just gave me the freedom to work in a workflow that made sense to me, and yeah, that just gave me a way to continue to evolve and scale. A lot of it really came down to just wanting to control my own destiny. That's what I used to say in the early days. It wasn't always easy, but yeah, just having some agency over what I was doing and how I was doing it provided a lot of meaning that I just didn't get in a corporate environment. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 04:19

I mean, did you notice any of that early on? Because now when I look back, the signs were always there of... And we're going to talk about this kind of weird pairing between ADHD and entrepreneurship that seems to be quite natural and comes up quite often.But when I look back, the signs were always sort of there. Like in my school, I was highly distracted and distracting other kids, early life obviously. And I would go home and hyper focus and get my stuff done and still scored well. But I was a pain in the ass during actual school hours. And then later on, when I actually entered the job market, places where I had a lot of autonomy, I did really well. And so I was a great hire for companies that kind of had a chaotic and loose structure because I would go in and just, with a lot of ownership, treat the place like I could like I owned it, which sometimes annoyed anybody there that was more senior than me. But I was just set about making changes and trying to make things happen. But at the same time, at some point, pretty quickly, I would also kind of burn out of that role because at the end of the day, it wasn't my company and I'd be pushing against a lot of friction sometimes of trying to make things happen.And I'd either get bored or something else would happen and then I'd wind up leaving. But where do you see some signs in early life that like... I'm trying to do things differently. 

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Shawn Johnston 05:45

Yeah. It's a similar story. I spent a lot of time at the front of the classroom. A lot of report cards were, "Shawn's very social" which really wasn't what that was.But anyways, yeah, I think I really good, I was just, while you were talking, I remembered that there were, I worked at two restaurants while I was in school. One was Boston Pizza. I was a star server. I always got section 1, which was the busiest with all the booths that everybody wanted to sit in. And I could rock that from opening to close. And then when we moved into the city, this was out in Abbotsford, where I was going to school. I got a job at Milestones on Robson. And this was a place where it was just rigid process. It was about collaborating with everybody. And I crashed out of there in like three weeks, utter failure.So yeah, it was when I had the autonomy to operate in a way that made sense for me, I was a rock star. But you forced me into an unnatural process where I just didn't understand why I was doing what I was doing, couldn't make those connections, just abject failure. So yeah, it's a, yeah, there's a lot of those signs as far as where it's called a spiky profile, where you can be really, really talented in certain things and then just abysmal. And now there's the JetBlue example was a case study I heard once where this guy could, he could schedule hundreds of planes with ease. We couldn't pay his electric bill. And so yeah, yeah, looking back, there were definitely a lot of signs like that. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 07:29

I mean, it would have never occurred to me to do any sort of like organizational behavior study of Boston pizza versus milestones but I mean it sounds fascinating because That's something that never would have occurred to me that there'd be some sort of like cultural rigidity because I mean you don't think About these things when you go to a restaurant, right? and not to Undermine them anyway, but like, you know, Boston pizza, it's like a fairly like, you know, run-of-the-mill chain, right? So you don't really it was it was

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Shawn Johnston 07:55

Just run it however you wanted, like come up with your own system. I didn't care as long as the food got to people. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 07:59

Yeah, and comparing that place to Milestones, which in my mind is another run of the pill chain, it doesn't really seem likely to be that long. 

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Shawn Johnston 08:06

It was like it was like working inside of a machine. There is this stupid step look left So you anytime you went in the kitchen to look left and put dishes away?And sometimes it was like I just need to catch up for table five But like if you got caught doing that like you've gotten big shit So I just would get so distracted and there's just a poor people just never got their ketchup

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Mo Dhaliwal 08:30

Um, so let's talk a little bit more about this, uh, the spiky profile I were mentioning, um, you know, cause like the JetBlue example is awesome. And again, myself as well, like when I was in, um, university, even, um, I was in the business program and I blew through all of my electives. Like I w I think I went through four years of electives in the first two years. So English is philosophy, anthropology, everything was done because I loved all of that.Yeah. I didn't even know why I was in the business program at the time and anything that I didn't connect with on this, like the show level, like I couldn't, I couldn't like write two words to like save my life. It was moving mountains. Yeah. And so, you know, my grades were like A pluses and C minuses and Ds. Right. And that was, I didn't have a word for it before, but I guess the spiky profile. The spiky profile. Yeah. 

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Shawn Johnston 09:21

Yeah, it's just important to note, like I will always be speaking about neurodiversity from an ADHD lens. So ADHD is a diagnosis that I got eight or nine years ago when my son was diagnosed when he was struggling in grade five. And then once we realized, there was a very common scenario once we realized that I was also ADHD and I started letting people know, they were like, yeah, so it was very anticlimactic. I thought it was going to be this big revolution.Yeah. And they're like, no, yeah, absolutely. You didn't know. But for me, there was always sort of a part missing. And so autism was a diagnosis I received a couple of years ago. So the way the two neurotypes work with each other is a bit different. The best way that I can phrase it is the autism craves routine and rigidity where the ADHD craves novelty and ingenuity and excitement. And so those two will pull and tug a lot. So some of the ways that it gets missed is that the ADHD often acts as a mask for the autism. And given some of my early childhood experiences, I was very compliant and very people pleasing oriented. That was one of the ways I stayed safe. So it wasn't as obvious. There was, I had to work harder at some things and others like art class, like history class, these things I did really, really well. And it was always fascinated by social studies and stuff like that. English was the worst. The amount of effort I had to put in to get an A, because I had to have As, the success was an important way of showing worth. So yeah, it was a little bit harder to see, but yeah, the same idea is that if I really didn't connect with what I was doing, it was 10 times harder to be successful at it. But yeah, and then there's a lot of systems that went into figuring out how to make that possible, even though it wasn't easy. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 11:37

So when you were young, like what were some of the other coping mechanisms, like, I mean, I look back and again, now, you know, so much of it is crystal clear. And I can see where there was plenty of times where I just didn't get it.And I wasn't really able to follow along or perform in the expected ways. And there's all sorts of coping mechanisms that I had sort of developed to try to figure my way out. But did you do you have any things that you did instinctually to try to get along and figure it out? 

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Shawn Johnston 12:11

Yeah, I mean, part of it was, again, so for me, the sensory experiences, it was always the hardest part, sounds, smells, noises, touch, those sorts of things. And so I spent a lot of time alone reading. So reading was an escape where I could just disappear into a world, and it was an obsessive amount of reading that I would do. Sometimes I would read to like two or three in the morning, just because it sort of soothed that sensory experience in a way.So a lot of my coping was around, because a lot of the negative feedback I got was social and hierarchy-based. So I always really struggled with the idea of hierarchy being meaningful, like why should a parent have more power than a child? Why should a teacher have more power, like really struggled with that? And so a lot of my coping was, and again, looking back, it's like people don't do this. But it was like an exhaustive in-depth sort of like social study of how people interacted, what the rules were, was observing who was successful and why they were successful, and then adapting my behaviors around that. So I actually built a really, really, I could spend a few hours talking to you about it, a really, really complex set of rules so that I could make sure that I didn't say the wrong things at the wrong time, and that I had the right facial expressions and I managed the right tone. Wow. Yeah. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 14:06

It was exhausting. It sounds like it.I mean, because it's something that's sometimes described as masking and, you know, masking is talked about almost in the instinctual terms, like you just kind of do some things, but it sounds like you took on masking as like an art and science and like a rigorous practice almost. 

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Shawn Johnston 14:21

Yeah, that's, so in, again, in the, in the audio HD world in particular, it's referred to as high masking for, for whatever reason. So yeah, it is the idea of, of completely creating a persona that can be successful. Um, the, the problem is too, particularly for those of us that are, that are late in life diagnosed, um, you don't know you're doing it. It's just about survival.Um, I think the statistics is 80, 80% of neurodiverse and autistic people, um, suffer from chronic PTSD. Um, and that has to do with, uh, early life childhood trauma, whether that's through caretakers, whether it's through bullying, whether that's through just not having your needs met or having to exist in a sensory experience, that's just too overwhelming. So when you, when you, um, when the masking sort of becomes how you manage that, um, and then it just becomes invisible. Um, so the unmasking process, which is something I've been doing for, that's where a lot of the, where we uncovered the autism was, we started pulling apart the mask and we realized there were stuff there that's not just ADHD.Um, yeah, that, that whole process is, um, that's, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's painful, you know, there's a, there's a grief that can come with, uh, with the realization that just how many of your needs were met and how hard that kid had to work just to fit in. Yeah. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 15:58

Yeah. I mean, and I relate to that a lot. Like similarly, grew up in a, you know, childhood home where there was just a lot of fear. Had an alcoholic father, had a mom who at the time was just like ridiculously rigid. Like there was, you know, my high school, like, you know, young girls that had more freedoms in life than I did because it was just like there was this fear based virginity in the household. And so, yeah, I just grew up in a real fear based environment and had to figure out how to navigate around it, like constantly stepping on eggshells.And then as a result, just kind of really shrinking down into like my own world. And I'm also an only child. 

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Shawn Johnston 16:42

The two brothers, that would have been harder for sure. Yeah. Yeah. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 16:46

And it was, you know, a very solitude, like very solitary experience in many ways. But it was like any relationship I formed wound up being like really meaningful, right? And really deep. And so some of my relationships from high school, and there's only a handful of them, you know, are still around today. And they're not even like friends anymore. It's like family because those are the people that I had, right? And that was it.Yeah. But what kind of came out of that though was, and this is something similar to what Malcolm Gladwell actually describes, I forget which book is it is, but it's this idea that you hear about the success stories of CEOs and, you know, dyslexia, this, that, the other. But for so long, those were painted as adversity stories, the idea that, you know, they persevered despite having these limitations and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. And so he does a study where he says actually they persevered because of those things. Yep. Right. Yeah. Because that person who's a CEO today, but as a young dyslexic kid, when they're sitting in a classroom or they're in a home environment or somewhere else where we have these really like codified environments and patterns on how you're supposed to behave and work and things you're supposed to understand. And as a young child, you're looking around and saying, like, I don't, I don't know what the hell's going on. Right. And, and then you have to start looking for cues because you're still a little scared and you don't want to let on that you don't know what the hell's going on. Yeah. So you start looking for other cues to figure out what might be happening to kind of play along and figure out what the next step might be. Right. And he described this as an amazing scenario where what winds up happening is that these people cultivate these incredible skills of being able to read situations where something hasn't been told or written down by the kind of know what's happening because they've gotten so attuned to the cues. Right. Yeah. And then you fast forward decades later and now when that person's sitting in a board meeting and they're, you know, reviewing financial statements or performance or whatever and people are saying certain things and there's a report on their desk that is, you know, written information saying, here's what happened. They're able to pick up on a million other cues of knowing what's really happening, what the real situation is. Yeah. 

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Shawn Johnston 18:54

Yeah, it's what you're describing is actually something I've been digging into a lot lately. So it's the difference in, because neurodiversity in all of its sex spectrum, it's their neurotype differences. And that really boils down to the processing and filing of information and the retrieval of that information and how that can be impacted by stress, sensory experience, overload, those types of things. But neurotypical people, when they're having conversations, they're actually processing language, tone, volume, facial and body expressions simultaneously. And they're doing it in a predictive model. So they're, you know, the reading between the lines, but they don't realize that they're doing this. And so in a neurodiverse space, again, it's a spectrum, not from less to most, but just that spiky profile, what you're good at, what you're not. We live through what's called bottom up reasoning. So the parts of our brain, the parts of a neurotypical brain that make those connections in real time, we don't have access to it. So we have to process each of those data points individually and then tie it together. And we do that by starting at the bottom, foundationally and working our way up to meaning. And a lot of that is done through black and white thinking, through hyperliteralism. So you know, one of the hardest parts between a neurodiverse and neurotypical communication barriers is something called the dual empathy problem, where I'm processing your word choice and then inferring what you actually mean by that, by tying in your tone, the situation, the context. And I do that slower.And the more of my cognitive process that goes into figuring out what you mean to say, the less control I have over my responses to it. So my volume may go up, I'm not paying attention to my tone anymore, my facial expression might fall off because I'm not paying him as much attention. And so what's happening is the other person is getting messages I don't mean to send. And then they're instinctively responding to it because they're processing in real time. So what happens is, particularly in conflict or in negotiations, is we're having two totally different conversations, even though it looks like we're having the same one. And that's that double empathy problem. So yeah, because in early childhood, we were forced into what I've heard called, to really like it, compulsory neurotypicality, we have no choice. So you either succeed or fail. And for some of us, failure is painful, it's a matter of survival. There are real repercussions of not succeeding. And so yeah, you've created that rule book for yourself. And then later in life, you now have this set of tools that no one else has, that you can now apply to all kinds of different situations. So you can pick up, because the neurotypical brain is just doing what it's always done. It's a bit lazy that way. But we've developed this skill set, so you can see the patterns, you can see the where certain parts of the context, certain parts of the problem are influencing what's actually being said or felt in the moment. 

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Shawn Johnston 22:34

And then you can sort of address that, because we're dealing with them as individual data points. We're not stuck in trying to in this on the fly, unconscious way of processing everything emotionally. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 22:45

Yeah, I mean, and it's sounding like, you know, like really hard shit, right? And not easy. Yeah, not easy at all.And so then you would think that, you know, maybe with all of this like effort and emotional and psychological effort that's being expended, a lot of it subconsciously, I'm just trying to figure things out and, you know, move forward in life, that you might gravitate towards something that reduces complexity or makes things easier. But in fact, you know, this gives rise to a lot of people with what, you know, the symptoms that you're describing and the sort of neurodivergence that you're describing, it gives rise to these people like waiting headlong into entrepreneurship, you know, starting an agency isn't for the faint of heart.No. So, so why do you think that's the case? 

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Shawn Johnston 23:34

I think, again, drawing from my own experience, I think what we're all looking for is a sense of agency over our lives. And entrepreneurship and building your own business just has this allure of, I can do it however I want, whether we're actually articulating that or not.Growing up and through early adulthood, I can't say that properly, adulthood, your boundaries are always being crossed. Your needs are never being met, even by yourself. And you're existing in a framework that actually doesn't make any sense to you. Just because you can figure out the rules doesn't mean they actually make any sense. I don't know why people react the way they do sometimes. I just know that they do, and so I can deal with that. It doesn't mean I get it or even agree with it. So I think that's the idea. Now, the problem is when you first start out, it's all about energy and chaos and activity and getting things done. But eventually, as a business matures, it's not about that anymore, and now you become the problem, and then it starts to fall apart. And then because you're the leader, I would say the fish stinks from the head down. You're the one holding all the answers or needing to find the answers. But unless you understand why you're making the decisions the way that you make, and again, a lot of neurodiverse ... I mean, you said some of those numbers, it's probably higher because a lot of people just don't know. Don't know. Yeah. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 25:26

I was going to say, yeah, I mean, hey, I didn't I didn't know for a long time because I had a bit of I don't know, like these weird kind of side missions in life where I was working in tech for a part of a decade and switched to working for an advertising agency here in Vancouver. But throughout all of that, I really liked to party and yeah, I was I was, you know, not to the point of necessarily like full blown alcoholism. But I would say that perhaps I like to party a little bit too much. So much so that, you know, nightclubs going out, that social lubricant and the lowering of inhibitions, you know, I got so fascinated with that, that I actually turned that into a job as well.I'm just right. So yeah, so I started, you know, throwing these nightclub parties. And we would do them at a really beloved venue here in Vancouver called Ginger 62. It's not around anymore, but it was around for a long time. And we would do these like Thursday nights there. And it was incredible because I got to like host, I got to convene this group of people. And, you know, I would just be like, like just ripped within hours of this thing starting. And it was a place to kind of like unmask and let go. Yeah. But the weird thing that I didn't understand until like way, way later was that there'd be this strange moment where we would get to the venue and within the first hour or so, like long before I was drunk, you know, I would actually be super dysregulated and I would be like anxious and kind of like stiff. And, you know, people that I knew and good friends would come in and I wouldn't like greet them properly and I'd be kind of paralyzed and be kind of like looking past them almost in a weird panic. Right. And they just took it as me being like standoffish, oh, he's trying to act cool because it's his like club night or something. And it wasn't until like later when the alcohol kicked in that then I'd be like, oh, okay, like now we're... That's a really common tool to use. So once a month I would convene this event where for the first hour I would be like severely dysregulated and like anxious and paralyzed and get drunk to kind of get over it.And then spend a long time recovering. Yeah, because I also wasn't able to have that much social interaction without then kind of re-regulating myself. Yeah. So a weird dirty little secret that nobody knew was that, you know, if our nights ended at like 2 a.m. or something, right, I would spend the hours from like 2 to 5 a.m. being like by myself, but like awake in my apartment. I would just need to like, you know, watch TV, read magazines, like do something. But I'd spend hours just tinkering. Right. And you would think like you got to work next morning, you'd at least get some hours of sleep or do something. No, you need to re-regulate. I need to re-regulate. Yeah. And like, dude, I did this for years. Yeah. Right. Like on the regular. Yeah. And I just had no idea it was just my pattern. Right. It's like I go to the thing, I'm an asshole for the first hour, apparently. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 28:26

Right. And then I'm parting my face off and then I'm just spending hours in my apartment by myself, just tinkering around, half drunk, trying to like get back to normal. Yeah. And then rinse and repeat. Right. And then kind of instinctually, like, you know, like, what is it now? 13 years ago, I just stopped drinking. And again, I think it was probably getting to a point in my life where it could have been a problem and almost by accident, I just like, I just quit.And then things got super awkward because that thing that was like my lubricant, my catalyst for a lot of social, you know, moments wasn't there anymore. Yeah. And now it wasn't even that if I went to an event, it's like, oh, you know, it's hard being around drunk people. It wasn't even that. It was that I just couldn't hang at all. Right. And now I have this severe aversion actually to gatherings and like events and I just couldn't go anywhere. And now that, you know, paralysis totally took hold and I, you know, kind of like secluded myself and didn't really go to, you know, meet people or go to things anymore. And so for one thing that, you know, a whole part of my life just kind of dropped off and for, it took me a long time to figure out what actually happened during that period. And it's like all of the, you know, these weird crutches that I had to help me get over these social anxiety moments. I didn't have the tools. And I hadn't even like figured out why that was happening in the first place. So I just became avoidant and I would just avoid. Yeah, completely. 

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Shawn Johnston 29:56

Yeah, my pattern was to bail the day before or up to an hour before the event with some kind of concocted lie I thought was absolutely ironclad. Yeah, it's, we've spent a lot of time like, when you hit diagnosis and you start the unmasking on its own topic, but a lot of it too is just reflective, like if I can't do this now, why could I do it then?And a lot of it is what dysregulation looked like, how it showed up then. So like for me now, dysregulation looks like meltdowns or shutdowns, which are, you know, they're specific things. Once upon a time, what that looked like was rage, volcanic blowups, violence, it was partly because that was what was a safe way to express yourself in the house that I grew up in. And then later in life, particularly in toxic male circles, like, again, that was another way and that was acceptable to show up, like you couldn't fold up and cry. Yeah, but being agro was like, oh, that's right. He's a dude. Yeah, so that was acceptable. So in a lot of cases, the way it looked like one was like constant flakiness, just bailing at the last minute, because I didn't understand that what I was feeling was, was that that social anxiety that I couldn't get past because it didn't want to go into that space with the sounds and the lights and other drunk people and things like that. But when I did force myself to go to those things because there wasn't a way out of it, a party or something, some social repercussion was too strong to fake my way out of. It looked like me being an asshole through most of it. And then it looked like me being a grumpy asshole for the next three days. And that was just what dysregulation looked like. So, you know, a lot of this unmasking process as well as trying to first just be okay with the fact that people are still going to interpret what's going on in ways that you don't want them to, that was a pattern you created, you participated in it, that's the cost, it takes time, but also, and this is the part I'm still struggling with, is that those types of outbursts or ways of managing dysregulation had a double benefit, it blocked engagement. I have talked to you about it, I can do whatever I wanted, right? It was a way of sort of like managing it away, but now when you're trying to do things in a more holistic way, doesn't impact the people around you, you know, they want to talk about it, they want to process feelings, and that's harder for me. So if I'm already dysregulated or approaching dysregulation, that's sometimes, that's effort I need to expend, but it's the not easy part, because I also do have something called alexithymia, so I actually really don't, I can't in real time process what I feel in my body, I physically can feel the sensations, but I couldn't tell you what I'm feeling until later when I can process it bottom up. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 33:40

Explain that a little bit more because that sounds too familiar and I feel like I'm being diagnosed live 

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Shawn Johnston 33:46

Yeah, a little bit. Alexa Thymie is actually really, really common in the neurodiverse space. So if we think of emotion as just another type of sensory input, which it is, we have to process that in real time. But when you're feeling stress, when you're feeling fear, when you're feeling anger or hurt, these are big emotions.And so just like being in a really noisy nightclub, that sensory overload inhibits your ability to cognitively process what's going on. So in a lot of ways, particularly when you're in conflict, you don't know what's happening in your body. And so what can happen is you miss the buildup of the emotion so that you don't get in front of what becomes a blow up, a meltdown, an explosion. Sometimes you can't articulate to people how you're feeling. So then when you have neurotypical partners or friends who are saying, I'm feeling this way, it's hard for you to participate in those conversations because you can't identify it. I can say I have a feeling right here and it's hot and it feels white, but I couldn't tell you what that is until later when I can explain that I was feeling overwhelmed by the misunderstanding that was happening between us and what I was feeling was anxiety and stress because I was afraid you're going to be mad at me and having you be mad at me is probably the worst thing that could happen. So there's a lot of that as well, in particular when you're in intimate relationships or parent-child relationships where they want emotional connection, that's another thing that's hard because intuitive emotional connection is not easy for us, partly because you have to be able to understand what you're feeling in real time and I don't have that skill. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 35:43

Yeah. This is sounding way too familiar. That's incredible. Yeah. Because I mean, I never actually know how I'm feeling. It takes me a long time to figure it out.Whether it's a, you know, a critical situation, if it's changed, if it's been, you know, a relationship in the past, it would take me a long time to figure out what I was feeling. And this actually reminded me of a conversation I had with a therapist like years ago. And, you know, this therapist didn't last long. And I'm realizing now that perhaps it was like a skill mismatch because, you know, she asked me questions like, well, how did that make you feel? And I'd just be like, I don't, I don't freaking know how that made me feel. 

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Shawn Johnston 36:19

I don't know. I can intellectualize it for you. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 36:22

Like I'm to a point where she was like, well, you know, you're not being forthcoming enough So I don't think you're ready. I was like, yeah, you're missing it. Yeah, I don't I don't know like what to say to you

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Shawn Johnston 36:30

Yeah. In the therapy space, as an aside, it's actually really important to find someone that's, oh shoot, what's the word? I'm going to say pro-nerdverse. It's not the right term. I can't think of the right term, but they have to be aware and understand how that presents. Like fluent in that space. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That was a big thing for me.But just talking about like within leadership space or when you're working within a business, like when chaos erupts, when a serious situation erupts, like, you know, we had a data breach and our technical director was just like freaking out and being too reactive. Like he was a step away from just to how we're feeling and at lifetime of masking and repressing it, it does allow us in moments of chaos and crisis to just, again, operate from a logic place, from a place of cognitive processing. So I would say to him, that's probably not a good idea because we're going to need some of the stuff that's on there. So why don't we do this instead for right now? And he's like, oh, that's a good idea. So that can be where, particularly at a C-suite level, where we can be really successful is because we're less emotional in that way. It comes at a cost. So like this particular security breach, like I was stressed the whole time. I was just able to think through it. What happened after it all finished and the existential crisis is over, it was like three days of profound dysregulation. So the way that I deal with dysregulation is building Legos. So I worked my way through a pretty large set. A lot of noise canceling headphones, a lot of non-dialogue, a lot of dark rooms. But yeah. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 38:40

Yeah, I mean that sounds quite familiar as well, and I think sometimes you might accidentally scare the shit out of people around you and they look at you like you're a sociopath because there's crisis, there's all this stuff going on, and they're like, why aren't you having like a very visceral human emotional reaction? Why aren't you normal?Yeah, yeah. And instead you're able to cut through it and just be logical. 

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Shawn Johnston 39:01

It's because they're not being processed by the same areas of the brain, which again, neurotypicals, they don't think about it. They just, they apply that same lens to everybody.And then when you don't do it like them, you're broken. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 39:18

So, I mean, as someone who's invested what looks like a lot of time into figuring yourself out and how you operate, such that it sounds like you're starting to construct a bit of a user manual of Shawn Johnston, a little bit, you know, obviously your leadership style would have changed during that time. So, so how has it changed?Like when, when did that transition show up? Yeah. And how are you working with your team now? Yeah. So. 

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Shawn Johnston 39:44

Thankfully, some of them have been taken down. I didn't ever ask, but I guess people felt they could do it now. But about five years into the business, when I had dolphin for the third year in the row, which is just hiring a bunch of people and then laying them off because you've freaked out over your cashflow problems, I had actually managed to create a pretty toxic environment. I didn't like being at work, but when we did our third set of annual layoffs, Glassdoor was now a thing. And so there was some pretty horrible things written about me personally and my leadership style.And so that was a real moment of, I don't know, learning reflection. When you get that type of horrific feedback, you either face it, embrace it, and try to figure out how to move forward or sink into narcissism and just make it everybody else's problem. So the ADHD diagnosis had kind of happened around the same time. So I kind of leaned into it. And at the time, what I did is I got back to basics. So we just got down to the core of what we did. I moved back into a production role and we just reinvented the workflow and then we corrected the culture. And that was the start of what I've, I guess not my phrase, but I refer to it consistently as radical transparency. So we're all just humans doing our best job. I even say this to my kids, I'm just a person. I'm not anything different than you. So it's really just about people don't want leaders to be perfect. They don't want you to always be right. They just want you to lead. And sometimes that means not knowing the answer and collaborating with other people to collectively come up with answers. And so the process from there was really just also culturally getting back to basics. What did I want? Who was I? How did I want to operate in the world? Not only as a leader in a business, but just as a human, a father, a husband, a friend. And I wanted to focus it on trust, truth, transparency, and helpfulness. And then from there, it was just building processes that did that and collaboration workflows that supported that so that we could output things that made the world, whether I was helping someone sell more widgets or their services, I helped them do a thing that helped them do things. So trying to find some meaning into what you're doing and enshrining those values into how you do the work by starting with why we're doing the work. So yeah, we had boiled ourselves down from about 17 people down to like six. And we just focused on relearning how to do it. And that actually was the very beginning of what has become Refoundry, which was six people had to be able to do a lot more with a lot less. And making myself a producer was a way of ensuring that my wages were coming from value I was creating. And so that process was really about finding the patterns in the work that we did and systemizing those patterns. And automation is a special interest of mine, it always has been. I had one of my agency jobs, we had these ridiculous repetitive procedures of being up uploading files a certain way, took like an hour. 

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Shawn Johnston 44:01

And I used, do you remember Automator? It was an app that shipped with, yeah, I used Automator and a lot of creative window placing to turn that into a five minute job, which then made my job super boring, but it didn't matter.So yeah, it was really just about creating those systems. And then moving into or moving towards finding ways for people to also enjoy the way they did their work, and to enjoy the collaboration with clients and for clients to enjoy the process too. So A lot of that was exit interviews, not being afraid of criticism, like taking nightmare projects and pulling them apart to figure out where did the process break? Where could we have gotten in front of this? And then just constantly evolving and polishing the process until we could find the consistency that we're looking for. And under that was the creation of tools, so like common components and how that factored into developments and how we could agree to certain norms and sort of agree to certain basic strategies that were what we're starting with. So we were pretending to start from scratch every time. So yeah, I've lost track of the actual original question. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 45:33

No, no, I think that was actually, yeah, an excellent answer to the question, because really what I was trying to get at was where that transition showed up, where you had these internal realizations and how they manifested in the company. 

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Shawn Johnston 45:48

Yeah, there was that, that really dark moment. Yeah, I, I don't know. I got up, it was really stressed out about how it all played out. It was feeling really bad.And then I remembered glass door was a thing. And I was like, I wonder if anybody left anything. And it was like 11 o'clock at night and I logged in and it was, it was, I felt flayed alive, like just like my soul had been laid bare, like everything that I thought was cool about the culture we created was just ripped apart. Uh, I didn't sleep that, that night. I didn't sleep much for a while. So, um, I think, yeah, that's, that's where it showed up. It, it, it was just a, the ADHD and then later the autism and then just some other trauma unpacking as well, um, just gave me a lot of understanding into why I did the things that I did in the way that I did them so that I could, again, it's about agencies so that I could, I keep hitting this, I'm sorry, um, but agencies so that I could find ways to control the output and what I got back from it that didn't want people to be upset with me, I did not, wouldn't want people to be stressed out, but whatever I was doing was creating those outcomes.Um, so once you understood your role in those outcomes or the events that led to those outcomes, then you can, and then you understand the impulses or the decision-making or the, the, the cognitive processes that happen to get you there. Then just like any other system, you can start, um, addressing it. Um, so a lot of ways that's shown up now is, um, uh, uh, collective decision-making. So the process is sacred. We, we decide changes to it as a group, um, not individually. Um, the early days, it was really just accepting the fact that my brain worked differently and that my, um, comfort with rapid change doesn't mean everyone else is also comfortable with rapid change and that people's discomfort is not always communicated to you. Um, so, um, uh, being open to that dialogue and accepting when people don't agree with you and not resorting to I'm the boss, do it the way that I want, cause you know, dictatorships don't last because they don't work. Um, so a workspace really can't be any different. Um, so you have to be aware of how people want to work and what they think is successful and, and what your clients agree is successful and be prepared to change your mind and be adaptable to doing things in, in ways that, uh, um, that are optimized, um, whether it's optimized for you specifically or not.Um, so that, that was a lot of it is, is, and I get another, a huge piece was in this puzzle was we started releasing, um, anonymous pulse surveys with this app. Um, so people could give us anonymous feedback. And again, there was a lot of hard things in there too. Um, but then just leaning into, um, solving those or at least talking about them, and then again building culture and process around that. And then I think one last piece was just accepting the work of writing everything down. 

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Shawn Johnston 49:32

People can't know what they're doing within a system that doesn't include them all the time if it's not documented. So committing to that level of documentation, whatever that looks like, and having an owner that isn't the neurodiverse person is key.So there's a book that I read called Adult ADHD, how to be a hunter in a farmer's world. And there was lots of things I liked about it, lots of things I didn't. But this idea of these archetypes where everyone has a certain way of operating and there's some ways that you're successful and some ways that you're not, that other people would be successful. So understanding which business mechanisms belong with certain types of people and which belong with other types of people was another key factor. So yeah, there were stuff that I was doing that were better with farmers. So bringing other partners into the conversation so that I could slow my decision making process down so that I was forced to articulate certain ideas before we did it so that I could hear sometimes how crazy it was before actually doing it. And again, just also being open with the team, like, here's what I'm dealing with. Right. Here's how I operate. Here are the things that I need. When you see certain things, this is what's going on. That's our stuff. So just being human. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 51:00

I mean, these are some pretty profound realizations, and it's cool to see them being applied. And what I'm going to say is probably considered a little bit of a mundane space, right?Yeah, we're just banging out websites. Yeah, but just building websites. But I will say that now it's making some sense because I think it would take somebody with some degree of autism to go so deep into WordPress. 

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Shawn Johnston 51:28

It's not everybody's favorite tool, but it is prolific. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 51:30

So no, it's it's prolific, but I think you'd agree. It's it's a goddamn mess, right? Oh, yeah 

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Shawn Johnston 51:35

There's some stuff I don't understand and never will. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 51:38

Well, it wasn't built with any rhyme or reason, it just kind of organically grew up. And so you have this organic, multi-tentacled, many thousand-tentacled animal, which is WordPress, and that's why every WordPress build, every website is built differently. So it's this weird thing where it's the commonly understood thing of like, oh, that's the thing we use to build a website. And because it's so prolific and so well-known, there's an assumption that it's the standard.But when you look at it, it is the most bloody non-standard thing in the world because every single WordPress website on the planet, it thinks it's a unique and beautiful snowflake, and it's built entirely differently almost. Yeah. So the idea of trying to wrestle that down, it seems like a pretty greganturing challenge, but that's where you decided to put your energy with Refoundry. Yeah, that's right. 

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Shawn Johnston 52:34

Yeah, well, like, all websites are the same. I know we like to pretend like every website's its own unique. It's not. If you strip away color and space, the structure is the same, right? Left or right blocks, grid alignments, post links, banners, like, there's patterns. I click up and I want to see the content.Because we navigate things. I always liken it to cars. Like, there's lots of ways, like the famous Homer Simpson episode where he designed his perfect car that made no sense to anybody else. You know, doors around the side, wheels on the bottom, steering wheels in the front, because it just works and we don't have to think about it. Websites really have taken similar patterns. So if you if you stripped away the part that's different and focus on how to repeat what's the same. That was the start. But, you know, why why WordPress? I get that question a lot because there are definitely better CMS's. It was largely to do with the fact that it is the default. You know, as a small agency, I don't have to try to talk you into Webflow or Squarespace or Kraft or a custom Laravel application I came up with. Most of the people we talk to come to us because we're WordPress experts because they know they don't want to leave WordPress because an end client actually doesn't care how you make it.They just want to be able to change the content on their on their about page. Like, this is this is what it comes down to. And that allows them to do it with having to learn something new. So. So, yeah, we it was the founders journey really started and we fell on a bunch of things before then. But when the full site editor part of Gutenberg. So Gutenberg is the block based backend of WordPress that everybody immediately hated. I thought it was cool just because it was a different way of looking at how to how to manage content and make things. But when the full set editor full site editor pieces came in where templates and headers and footers could also be block based. Right. At that point, I'm like, you don't even really need a theme anymore. Like, this is a really interesting opportunity.It's still. An unmitigated mess in some ways. Like, like, why are why are template parts behind the patterns menu? Like, why is it there? Why why do I edit a template by clicking edit site? Like, there's some some of those things that don't always make sense. But yeah, when we first got the funding because we submitted a project to our app for the original funding, which allowed us to hire an engineering team and build out Refoundry version one. The the joke was like the mission statement was make Gutenberg good now. And that was that actually that line will show up in things even still. So it was it was it was really just about extending what was already really powerful and creating consistency. And extending ability and and finding how much of the work that we traditionally assume is done in the theme by developers. How much of that can we bring in? So the the other catalyst was Webflow success. 

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Shawn Johnston 56:00

So it's like, this is really great. And like someone finally figure out how to do low code, no code without it outputting absolutely shit code. Gutenberg is kind of doing this cool thing over here. Can like and then Figma was kind of blowing up as like, can we like marry some of these ideas into something that allows me to take this thing that we do over and over again and make it easier? So, yeah, that was was the original sort of catalyst.And yeah, why WordPress? Because. It's 43 percent of the Internet. People still want to buy it. And wasn't interested in trying to talk people into something else. And so. Yeah, for for good or bad, that's that's the path we took. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 56:43

I'm just hearing multiple levels of pattern recognition across everything that you said. It's pretty fascinating to walk through the journey because it's like, why WordPress pattern, right?Why Gutenberg, immersion pattern, right? Now what comes after that, the next pattern. 

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Shawn Johnston 56:59

Well, and even, uh, even like the next things that we're releasing later this year and next year, our current IRAP project is on AI and additional automation. So it's just how do we extend the pattern further? 

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Mo Dhaliwal 57:15

What would be your advice to a leader, an entrepreneur, frankly, anybody that kind of gravitates towards this world with or without an ADHD diagnosis? What would be your advice to somebody that's trying to lead and manage people today? 

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Shawn Johnston 57:32

All anybody wants is to be heard and seen, and that's true of your most junior employee as it is with your most senior and everyone in between. There's a lot of people talk a lot of smack about the millennial generation at Gen X, but this is just what they want. They want to know that they have some agency in the spaces they choose to be in because it is a choice for them, and I think that's super admirable, and Gen Z is even more profoundly in this direction, but they want to know that they can be heard and validated, and I don't think that's a bad thing.There's a lot of this boomer mentality in corporate and agency spaces where it's like, do as I say, execute, show up, don't complain, give me more to be successful. It was unsustainable then. None of us ever liked working in environments like that, so I don't know why some of us still continue to operate this way. I never asked people to do more than I would do myself because I wouldn't want them to, and taking a moment to be flexible, to hear what somebody has to say, we're human, we're going to have feelings. If a client's an asshole to us, it's okay to have feelings about that. It's not about not having feelings. Is the output back to the client professional and the high road? That's what matters, but they're allowed to have a moment, and giving them a space to have that moment is extremely important.This is how you create connection. It's how you create safety, and it's how you create, I don't like the word loyalty, it's how you create longevity. If you want to be a leader of well-rounded humans with feelings, good days and bad days, that need to work together so that you can make money, you have to invest in your own emotional intelligence, and you have to do the work for yourself too.If you think you're perfect and there's nothing to fix, there's nothing to work on, then just don't do it. It's not going to work for you. You have to be prepared to learn too. Learning and growing is the point of what we're doing, whether you're a business owner or an employee or whatever, it's the process of becoming that never really ends, and that takes all different types of expressions and flavors. If you want to lead people, they need to see you grow too. They need to see you admit mistakes to be open to saying, yeah, fucked up, yep, I should have done that, I really apologize, it's not going to happen again, or it won't happen the same way again. People need to see humility, they need to see authenticity, and they need to see safety. I talk about that a lot in the sense that people in a workspace need to feel like they're operating in a place of safety, which means there aren't unfair expectations for them to be stressed out all day long with no solution or having to be available after hours or being responsible for things they're not being compensated properly for, or that there aren't rules for how people talk to each other. If Gary gets to be a dick to everybody, and because he's a developer and we don't expect developers to be kind human beings, then that's a cultural problem. 

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Shawn Johnston 01:01:33

It's not everybody else's job to put up with Gary being a dick. Gary can go.There's lots of other people that can do the job in a way that's beneficial to the people around them. That's what I would say. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 01:01:51

Yeah, I mean, I think you landed on something pretty incredible there. Um, Google did a study years ago cause they were trying to figure out what makes teams effective. Um, and this is from like 2016 or something. Um, but they run this whole research study and they made, you know, the reports and results and everything public. Um, but the number one correlation that they found for like the, the most effective teams was psychological safety.Uh, it was like the number one correlation. Yeah. It was like, if it says it, yeah, it must be true, right. Um, yeah, well, I mean, this was pre AI hallucination. So I think we can, we can trust the humans for the most part as I put together that research study. Um, but yeah, it was that it's, you know, if you can be in an environment where yes, you're seen and you're heard, and you have the psychological safety to fully express yourself. I mean, it seems so basic when you think about it, right? And of course that group would be more effective. 

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Shawn Johnston 01:02:43

Yeah, and I think, and this is its own whole topic that we can fall down, but there's a lot of, I'll just say, corporate culture that's really rooted in colonial patriarchal mindsets, particularly ones entrenched in white supremacy, the patriarchal male-first environments, neurotypicality and ableism, where anything that doesn't fit this narrow division of normal isn't just punished, it's actively persecuted. And that's where a lot of this lack of safety comes in is because we're still unconsciously operating from these social hierarchies.And that we're all beholden to, like even cisgender and traditional white culture, beauty restrictions and things like that. If someone's having a bad day, I don't have to understand why they're having a bad day. They need the afternoon off, they should feel safe asking for it, and they should feel like there's no repercussions for it. And then I'm gonna check in with them the next day to make sure they're okay. And if they need another day, that's gonna have to be okay. And there's gonna have to be other people that need to be a part of shoring that up. And if they need extra resources, like it's my job to make sure that they understand that there is therapy coverage and the benefits package and that they can take advantage of these things. So it's really, it's all of that. And yeah, safety comes in all different shapes and sizes. And I think ultimately, biologically, we're geared towards wanting to be safe. And that's where masking is really rooted in is that finding out safety, is finding that safety. So some ways of finding safety within hostile environments are not sustainable and not healthy. So as a business owner, your job, just like it's your job in all different types of social paradigms is to ensure that safety is the foundation. Everything else grows from there. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 01:05:15

So, I mean, I hate to end it here, but I feel like right at the end, you've just touched on something that could be its own two-hour episode of white supremacist, cisgender, ablest foundations of what is capitalist society, which is... That's the capitalist society. 

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Shawn Johnston 01:05:34

And inherently unsafe which is rooted in colonialism. Yeah. Yeah, that's his one thing I've been diving into that that's gonna have to be a part two 

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Mo Dhaliwal 01:05:41

or three of this episode, we joked about it, but like, literally, you're ending on like the biggest note of a whole tangent that we need to go down. But yeah, I think what I'm going to take away from this is really, I think, reinforcing my own ability to see and hear people and perhaps with some amount of vulnerability and what's the word I'm looking for, you know, sharing, maybe, you know, exposing myself a bit more through that, it'll create a bit more safety for other people to actually say, okay, we see and hear him.And now there's a space for us. 

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Shawn Johnston 01:06:18

like if you don't feel safe doing that in a work environment, like that's a good indication that you have created an unsafe work environment and you need, that's a good place to start. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 01:06:29

Awesome. Well, Shawn, this has been fantastic, man. Thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for your time.No, it was fun. I love having these conversations. And good luck with the Refoundry and everything you've got going on. If people want to learn more about what you're doing, what Forge and Smith is doing, about where Refoundry is headed, where should they go? 

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Shawn Johnston 01:06:46

I mean, my LinkedIn profile's got all the links that's the easiest place, you know, just hit me up with a connection and I post pretty regularly there. I post on TikTok as well and talk a lot about process and leadership.Real Agency Shawn. And then yeah, it's just the main site, Refoundry.io. If you want to learn about the product, if you want a discovery call, just let me know. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 01:07:15

Thanks, Shawn. 

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Shawn Johnston 01:07:15

Thanks. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 01:07:19

Hopefully we've given you a lot to think about. That was High Agency, like and subscribe and we will see you next time.