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Burnout Isn’t the Problem. It’s the Signal.
Most leaders treat burnout like a fire to put out. But what if it’s actually the smoke from a deeper design flaw?
In a conversation with energy and culture expert Josh Allan Dykstra, we explored why leaders need to stop trying to “bounce back” from burnout and instead build systems where burnout is far less likely in the first place.
Josh doesn’t believe burnout is a personal failure. In fact, he challenges a common leadership assumption: that resilience means enduring more. Instead, he defines it as recovering faster and needing to recover less often.
This simple shift, from enduring to designing, is a game-changer for any leader committed to building a sustainable high-performance culture.
Why This Matters for Leaders
In most organizations, we design for productivity, not vitality. We obsess over output but rarely ask, “How does energy flow through our team?”
The consequence? Teams running on empty. Leaders stuck in reactive mode. Cultures that normalize exhaustion.
Josh flips that model. He encourages leaders to see energy as a design element. Not just something individuals manage, but something organizations actively shape.
The question becomes: How do we design work so that it gives energy rather than just drains it?
The Science of Aliveness at Work
Josh’s research points to a foundational insight: when people are aligned with their energy sources—what lights them up—they become more creative, collaborative, and resilient.
In neuroscience terms, we’re shifting from sympathetic nervous system overdrive (fight/flight/freeze) into parasympathetic states where restoration, innovation, and deeper connection become possible.
In other words, vitality is the precursor to performance. Not the other way around.
Action Steps You Can Take This Week
- Audit for aliveness. Ask your team: Which parts of your work give you energy? Which parts deplete you? Start there—not with another tool or tactic, but with curiosity.
- Design for energy rhythms. Josh suggests we treat energy like a natural rhythm, not a fixed resource. Build in recharge zones. Encourage energy-aligned scheduling (for instance, don’t hold your most strategic meetings at 4 p.m. on a Friday).
- Name the patterns. Often, burnout stems from unconscious over-functioning. That’s where pattern recognition comes in—a skill we develop through tools like the Enneagram. The more you understand your own reflexes, the more freedom you have to design your leadership intentionally.
The Real Future of Work? Aliveness.
At Meritage, we’ve always said: Your greatest strength can also be your biggest blind spot.
But your energy, when designed wisely, can be your greatest asset. Not just for your own sustainability, but for your team’s ability to thrive in complexity.
Josh leaves us with this reminder: “Work is a place where energy should rise, not fall.” If you’re a leader, that starts with you.
Let’s design for energy, not just efficiency.
For deeper insights into how your leadership patterns affect team energy, explore the Enneagram Applied program.
Episode Transcript
Susan Drumm: We are standing at the edge of the most transformational decade in human history. The question is, are you preparing for it? Are you simply hoping to survive it? I’m Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each week we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs grow in leadership and in life.
My guest today is Josh Allan Dykstra, who spends his time answering the complex questions about the future and so much more. Josh is a futurist pioneering the field of future design, helping leaders transform from tomorrow’s passengers into architects of the future they want. His unique background offers a refreshing perspective on transformation.
Over the past two decades, Josh has served clients at companies including Microsoft, Sony, Genentech, Chanel, and Amazon. He’s the CEO of The Work Revolution, and his articles and ideas have been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, and The Huffington Post. He’s also the author of the book Igniting the Invisible Tribe: Designing an Organization That Doesn’t Suck. Josh, welcome to the show. I’m so excited to have you.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Oh, I’m excited to be here, Susan. Thank you for having me.
Susan Drumm: So, I love talking to futurists, because I’m like, what’s going to happen? Tell me. Is that what people do when they come to a futurist like you? You’re kind of like a fortune teller, right?
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yes, get out the crystal ball. I think there’s probably a place for a couple different things inside the futurist container — I’d be curious to see what you’ve encountered over the years. But from my perspective, I call myself an optimistic futurist. The reason for that is I believe dark, dystopian, Terminator-like visions of the future are really easy to conjure. I think coming up with positive, possible futures is actually much harder, so I think we need a lot more of that. That’s why I do that.
But I also want to tell people that I’m not a born optimist — I’m a chosen optimist. I think sometimes when people hear that word, they think, “Oh, everything’s just flowers and roses and unicorns and rainbows.” And no — some people maybe are born that way, but that wasn’t me. I choose to be an optimist because I think it’s just a better strategy for creating the future that we want. So that’s really my kind of futurism: how do we design and create a better future, because I believe it’s co-created by all of us together.
Susan Drumm: I love it. So, let’s talk about your journey to start. You said you weren’t always an optimist, but you’ve become more of one. So, tell us the journey for you, getting to where you are today.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Initially, coming out of my childhood, I really thought I was going to be a performing musician — a rock star. I grew up on stages, in churches and recitals. I was a classically trained pianist from the age of five, writing songs when I was four. I grew up playing instruments and being on stages, drawing a crowd in the music stores in the shopping malls — we had those in the ’80s, at least here in the US.
I really always thought I was going to be on stage as a musician. I took it pretty seriously, recorded some albums, got a manager, moved to Los Angeles, and realized pretty quickly after being in LA that I am not a night person, Susan. This is a problem, right? If you’re going to be a rock star, you’ve got to be up pretty late for the rock star festivities, and I was like, “No, I think I want to be in bed at 10:00.” So I was like, this career is obviously not going to work for me. But what I realized then is that having the energy for the thing you want to do is actually a really important thing — that was kind of my first lesson in that.
That kind of pulled me down the road, and I got really interested in strengths-based philosophy, and then this topic of human energy and how we get into energized, flow states at work. I ended up being a consultant and a workshop facilitator for the better part of a decade. Then I took that and started training other coaches and consultants. Then we built a tech company, and we closed that tech company last year — that was quite a formative, interesting experience.
Coming out of the tech company closure last year, I had a bit of a dark night of the soul. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I really thought I was building a billion-dollar tech company for a few minutes there, and that, obviously, did not happen. So I was like, what am I going to do next?
I thought, wow, I really never got to do as much speaking as I wanted to. I missed the world of thought leadership and ideas and influencing, and being back in the public sphere with ideas. So that’s what I’ve tried to rebuild over the last year or so. I really think I can take my organizational expertise from the last twenty years and hopefully help us understand how to use some of the knowledge we’ve gained in the world of building great organizations, and point that more at how do we build better societies — how do we build better lives for everybody, in and outside of work?
Susan Drumm: Well, let’s start with your own journey along conscious leadership. Who were you as a leader? It sounds like this tech experience really transformed you. What have you learned from it? What were the mindset shifts that occurred along the way?
Josh Allan Dykstra: That was really an interesting project. I kind of went in with a lot of confidence and in my own kind of nerdery — I’m kind of a tech-brained person, and there was a stint where I worked for Apple. I say I used to be a Genius, not anymore, but I worked for Apple as a Genius for a little bit. So I’m kind of a nerd, and I thought, I’m going to get into this tech thing and I’m going to kill it.
There were just so many things I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I tried to be smart about it — I tried to put people around me who understood more than I did about what it’s like to build a tech company. So I didn’t do it naively, and yet it still just kicked my ass. It was still so hard.
It was really a painful process, from business partner betrayals I experienced, to just the difficulties of raising money and then trying to raise more money. You’re kind of on this endless cycle of raising money as a tech startup, and the frustration of how that competed with the thing I really wanted to do, which was serve the customers. I ended up in this battle to just be continually getting more capital, which eventually led to me closing that down and having to file bankruptcy.
Susan Drumm: And that was because you couldn’t get the capital that you needed to keep growing?
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, we couldn’t. We got to a point where we just couldn’t get another fundraise done, and we didn’t have enough customers yet to keep it alive. It was kind of a bizarre confluence of timing too, because this was all happening during the pandemic. We released our first version of this in 2020, and for a minute there — actually for a couple of years — I really thought we were building a really big thing, because everyone in 2020 and 2021, leaders were very much like, we care about your burnout, we care about work flexibility. Everybody’s looking for technology to help them do the thing we were building, so I was like, we hit the timing of this perfectly.
But then the winds really changed hard in ’23. The capital markets went weird and everything kind of shifted to AI, and we really weren’t AI. So I couldn’t get another fundraise done, and I ended up running out of money. Much to my deep sadness, I closed it down. Because I was a majority owner of the business, and I wanted to keep my house, I thought, well, I guess I need to file bankruptcy — so I did that.
I learned a ton going through this. One thing was the importance of business partners, making sure you pick the right ones, because I had kind of both — I had one business partner who was with me the whole way through, couldn’t be better, just a phenomenal partner. Then I had a couple others that were not so good, and really did some serious damage to the mission and the business. So that was a big learning. I like to say that I learned something about knowing when to let go.
I think I did probably hang on for too long. I’m not sure though, if that’s true — looking back, would I have done it any differently? I’m not sure. I think not letting go is actually like the superpower of an entrepreneur — we just keep going even when no one else believes. So it’s a really hard thing to do. As an entrepreneur, you have to get really comfortable with failure, because you’re going to experience it. Otherwise, if you’re not comfortable with failure, don’t be an entrepreneur, right?
Susan Drumm: Totally, totally.
Josh Allan Dykstra: But then, yes, I think it’s kind of our persistence and our willingness to keep going in spite of the failures that makes us good at what we do. So it really becomes a hard thing to know when to stop doing that.
Susan Drumm: When to stop. Yeah, agreed, agreed. So, how does your experience of what you went through there impact your thought leadership now around the future of work?
Josh Allan Dykstra: I think having kind of been reduced to some sort of layer of dust in this process — sometimes I think about this as the transformation of the caterpillar to the butterfly, a common metaphor. But what I didn’t realize is that in that process, in the chrysalis phase, there’s a first phase called histolysis, and that is actually the caterpillar turning into goop.
Susan Drumm: Yes.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Right, and you’re just reduced to this pile of goop, and then you have to get reconstructed into your next form. I think going through those kinds of experiences, if we let them, it does make us much more — I think it’s made me much more determined for the next chapter. I feel a sense of determination going into the next chapter that feels different than last time.
I think I’m better now at believing strongly still, but holding more loosely, if that makes sense. My determinism is even maybe stronger than it was, but I think I’m better at holding the how more loosely — like, how do we get there? So I think that’s what really feels like it’s making a difference for me into the next phase: I feel like I’m watching, or listening, or even feeling more for the divine timing of things, or the flow states of things, or even just the strategic pattern recognition of things — whatever label you want to put on it. But it’s about paying attention to these things and trying to stay in the flow of what’s happening, instead of just trying to force what I want to happen.
Susan Drumm: Exactly. We’re all about pattern recognition here, because all the body of work that we’ve developed for Meritage is around pattern recognition and pattern disruption. I would completely agree with you that effective leadership is generated from pattern recognition and pattern disruption. You’ve got to know, first of all, are you in a pattern — is there a pattern operating, is it a pattern you want or a pattern you don’t want — and then, how do you disrupt that if it’s not effective, or you want to switch to something new.
Each of those stages is where I think mastery comes from in leadership. So I like what you’re saying at the end, which is recognizing that you can’t always just will something to happen. It’s about what you’re noticing about your environment, what you need to prioritize, what you don’t need to prioritize, and how you’re showing up in that space.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, that feels very resonant to me.
Susan Drumm: Well, tell me about the concept of future design that you said you’re writing a book on. You mentioned it’s about actively designing something better — share more about that concept.
Josh Allan Dykstra: I think what we want to do is first maybe re-examine the way we think about the future in general. I think many people, when they think about the future, think about it as a destination point on a map, and we just kind of hurtle towards that thing that’s going to happen. I don’t think the future works that way at all. I really believe the future is being co-created by all of us right now — we make different choices now, it makes a different future later.
We kind of understand this intellectually. It’s like, if I make different eating choices now, I have better health results later. I teach my kids different things now, they grow up to be more constructive humans. We kind of understand that, but in the big scheme of things, I don’t know that we really appreciate it or put it into practice.
Another thing we think about is — we often see time-travel movies, and we think you go back in time and change one little thing and it’s going to mess everything up. But we never think about that in the present, that if we do one little thing now, it’s going to matter just as much. So I think there’s a big opportunity here for us to reimagine the way we think the future works, and say, okay, if the future is the collection of things we are co-creating and planting the seeds of right now, then there’s actually less pressure put on the future.
It becomes more about now — what seeds am I planting now, what habits am I cultivating now, what practices am I practicing now, what systems am I building now. So I think that’s really the better frame for this topic of the future. And so when I say future design, that’s kind of what I mean: let’s put into practice now the things that create the kind of future we actually want.
This involves a couple things. Let’s get curious and clear about the future we actually want, because that’s another thing we tend to not be very good at. We’ve got a whole bunch of dark, dystopian, crazy visions of the future we don’t want — that’s clear. But I don’t think very many of us have a clear picture of, like, that’s really what I do want for my life, for my company, for my job, for my country. We don’t have a very clear picture, so I think that’s a practice we need to cultivate.
Susan Drumm: Yeah, I totally agree with that, because there’s this phrase: focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. You’ve probably heard that phrase before. It’s funny how it shows up — there was a leader who was always afraid of losing their job. They were really competent, really smart, highly educated, and yet somehow they created losing their job three times — someone I had recently connected with.
So much of it, you could see, was because they kept focusing on what they don’t want. It’s almost like — if you look at studies on driving, even your steering wheel will go toward that. So I think your point is, we’re steering the ship more than we realize, and the future isn’t being done to us. So where do you want to point that car — that direction?
Josh Allan Dykstra: That’s right. Do you want to just look at the potholes and aim your car for the potholes, or do you want to look at that incredible destination you’ve already had your eyes on?
Susan Drumm: Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Josh Allan Dykstra: And how clear a picture can we paint of the destination we actually want to get to? I think inherent in that is a challenge, though, because work and life right now are both exhausting. We are all exhausted, I think, for the most part — by the state of geopolitics, by the state of our workplaces, by the state of uncertainty, by the state of AI. Everything is hard right now.
So what happens is we get really hijacked, and we become unable to imagine a better future. We’re in this really kind of conundrum: we need better pictures of the future, but who has the energy, who has the time and space to imagine? It’s a really difficult conundrum, so I want to recognize that too — what I’m asking of people is not the easiest thing in the world, but I do think it’s the thing that steers us, to your point, to a better road.
Susan Drumm: Right. So, what are some of the practical steps that you think leaders need to take in order to co-create this future? It sounds like step number one is get clear on what a more desired future is for yourself. What are a couple more tips for folks?
Josh Allan Dykstra: The other thing I would really recommend people do is get more in touch with their own body and their own energy. The thing about human energy is that we really only understand or talk about it when we don’t have it. When you’re sick, or tired, or depleted, or exhausted, all you want is more energy, but we don’t talk about energy any other time.
So really learning to focus on: when do you feel energized? When is your cup full? When do you feel resourceful? And try to put yourself in those states, because I think that’s what allows us to get back into that space of imagination and wisdom. Your body’s a really good energy detector.
Susan Drumm: It is.
Josh Allan Dykstra: You know when you’re energized and when the life’s being sucked out of you — we know it, we’ve just been trained to ignore it. So kind of breaking that down, really getting back to paying attention to what my body is telling me, I think is a big step in this process. Especially at work — most of us can come up with a list of what drains us. That’s easy. Most of us do not know what parts of our work bring us life and energy. So I say, really, you want to increase what we call your energy intelligence.
And why is that? Most people know the brain is hardcoded to pay attention to pain and discomfort, and to try to avoid it. So we’re kind of hardwired to pay attention to some of the dark stuff we have to deal with in life.
Susan Drumm: And often we don’t give enough attention to the wonderful things. Think about how many times people have to be reminded to do a gratitude practice — if it came so naturally to the brain to do this all the time, we wouldn’t have to remind people to write down three things they’re grateful for before they go to sleep. Because, for survival purposes, it was all about focus on the danger and avoid the danger. And I think we’re looking to evolve past that very old part of the brain, the amygdala, and go into what’s possible for us as human beings to create.
Josh Allan Dykstra: I think you said that really well. That’s exactly right. Evolutionarily, we’re still kind of stuck in the past, and most of what we face at work for most of us isn’t like life-and-death problems, but it feels like it. It feels that heavy, and it feels that dark, and it can be challenging to get out of them.
Susan Drumm: And so, what next then? What should leaders do — even do tomorrow? What are the steps they need to take here?
Josh Allan Dykstra: So we’ve got a couple things. Get clear on your picture of the future. Understand that your body is something that requires refilling of energy — you need to refuel it for it to be able to work the way you want, which, again, intellectually we get, but we don’t work that way.
I think the next step for leaders is to understand that your job is systems. What I’ve come to believe is that most people live their lives at the effect of systems. We actually don’t make very many choices — we choose systems, and then those systems make choices for us.
For example, maybe you get the choice to go to a university for college — okay, you’ve made that choice, unless your parents made it for you. But once you’re in college, a lot of choices get made for you: your classes happen at this time, you’ve got to show up on these days, you’ve got to pay this much money — all of these choices are now being made for you because you chose that system.
This is the way it happens everywhere in our organizations. They’re full of systems. We chose to work there, maybe, but after that, a whole bunch of things are decided for you — what meetings you have to go to, how much health insurance you get if you live in the US, all sorts of things.
So what leaders need to recognize is that because of the hierarchical way we’ve constructed our reality, only certain people can change systems — and those people are what I call leaders. So, leaders, your job is to make these systems suck less, because most of them freaking suck. And I mean that literally — they suck the life out of people.
Let’s talk about some systems in the workplace: meetings, the performance review system, the HR information system, expense reports. How many people can say any of those things are life-giving for people? No — everybody hates them, they all suck. But leaders can actually make these systems better. So that’s why I say the work of leaders really is the work of — work on yourself probably first, but then right after that, it’s to change these systems, because they impact everybody.
Susan Drumm: I love your framing of that — I hadn’t thought about it in that way before. And the piece that I think leaders do need to recognize is, yes, you need systems to scale — that’s why they get put into place. We need a standardized way; everybody needs to follow the same process. We can’t have everyone deciding how they’re going to turn in their expense report and make it different for the people that need it. So we do need to create those systems.
But what I find is, once they’re created, they’re not undone or enhanced very often. It’s sort of like we’re on to the next thing, and we rarely go back and ask, is this the most effective way to do it? Can we do it a little bit better? Can we make it a little less burdensome for people?
Josh Allan Dykstra: Those questions are almost never asked, Susan. That’s exactly my experience too — once we put them there, they just kind of stay there, like there’s some sort of law of gravity now. It’s like, this is the way we do expense reports until the end of time.
Susan Drumm: Exactly. So you might want to think about, too, as a leader: what systems do you have in your life? I think doing this type of audit around what’s giving you energy and what’s depleting your energy — and then for anything that’s depleting your energy, let’s look behind this, let’s see what system is in place and what could be shifted in that dynamic. How could you make that different?
Even in terms of — I was just talking about this on another podcast — the system of the thirty-minute meeting or the sixty-minute meeting, such that now we have so many of them back to back. How about changing the system? It doesn’t have to be thirty minutes — you can make fifty-minute meetings, you can make twenty-five-minute meetings, so that you have time to pause, reset, and do what you need to do, and put in these buffers for yourself. That’s just a very simple one.
Josh Allan Dykstra: So simple.
Susan Drumm: Yeah, people don’t — we don’t do it.
Josh Allan Dykstra: We don’t, no. And that’s why I think this message is so important, and why leaders need to hold the flag for this — because a lot of people are just going to live and work at the effect of your systems, and if you don’t make it clear to them that they have the autonomy to change these things, they won’t. Otherwise, you can make these things better.
Susan Drumm: Yeah, I just think it’s huge. So many of these things are just happening constantly in organizations, and no one’s asking, do these things actually bring life and energy to our people? And the answer is usually no.
And are you even asking that question of your people? At the time of this taping, we’re nearing the end of the year, and as the new year starts, I think questions like, what makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning, what did you do over the past year that just excited you and got you going — shouldn’t you know that as a leader? And then the flip side: what made you want to press the snooze button?
Josh Allan Dykstra: And it’s not to say that every job — sometimes there’s the part of taking out the trash. It’s not like every single aspect of my work needs to be super energizing all the time. If you live in a house, you might love it, but you still have to take out the trash, and that part’s not so enjoyable. But hopefully it’s not the dominant part of what you have to do every day.
And so kind of getting a sense of that balance, because if the balance goes too much into “every day feels like I’m taking out the trash,” well, that person’s not going to be there that much longer.
Susan Drumm: Yeah, that’s right.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Sometimes the tendency is to be like, “Oh yeah, no, I can’t do it a hundred percent of the time, so I’m not even going to try,” which is just so backwards. Like, no — if you can just make it ten percent more energizing, twenty percent more energizing, do that. Just do a little bit at a time, and it does compound — it adds up for your people and for yourself.
Susan Drumm: Yeah, absolutely. So, where can people learn more about you and your work? I love that more people are starting to think about how they create their future, and I think you’d offer a lot of wisdom.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Oh, thanks, Susan. The best way to find me is probably my website, which is joshallan.com — J-O-S-H-A-L-L-A-N dot com. Or you can find me on pretty much any socials out there. I’m on LinkedIn a lot right now, but I’m going to be in other places a lot more frequently starting next year, with some of the things I’m building.
Susan Drumm: Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about systems and future design and an optimistic, designed future.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Thanks so much. I appreciate what you do, Susan. Thanks so much for having me.
Susan Drumm: And if you like this episode, you’re not going to want to miss my interview with Natalie Nixon, who wonders, when was the last time you paused — not for strategy, not for solutions, just to imagine. Let’s lead the way.
Hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and I’d like to point you to the next important step: hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I’ll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.