November 18, 2025

Episode 164: Designing Disruption-Proof Teams with Dr. Vijay Pendakur

In this conversation, Dane and Vijay begin with Vijay’s personal story of growing up in an underserved neighborhood in Chicago. Surrounded by hardworking families who still faced poor outcomes, he became obsessed with one question: how can talented people end up with such uneven results? That question led him into a career studying human performance, first in higher education and later in fast-moving software companies.

Vijay describes his early work in student experience design, where he learned to see campuses as complex ecosystems of inputs and outputs. Over time, he brought that same lens into employee experience design at organizations like Zynga, VMware, and Dropbox. The more he observed performance at scale, the more convinced he became that the real unit of performance is the team. High-performing individuals placed on dysfunctional teams inevitably underperform, while aligned teams can create a multiplier effect far greater than the sum of their parts. 

Much of the discussion centers on how risk aversion quietly blocks progress. Vijay notes that organizations often continue doing things that no longer work simply because the “old bar” of behavior feels safer than reaching for something new. At the same time, many companies overload themselves with 50 to 150 concurrent transformation initiatives. The result is a workforce being asked to operate like Cirque du Soleil trapeze artists, letting go of one bar before the next one appears. In that environment, trust becomes the harness that keeps people from burning out or opting out.

Rather than trying to fix everything at once, Vijay encourages leaders to focus on a few minimum viable behaviors that have an outsized impact on trust, resilience, and agility. He shares examples from human-centered design work in large enterprises, where embedded teams run micro-pilots and send “postcards from the field” to the rest of the organization. These simple updates help others learn from experiments without pretending that one playbook fits every function or culture. Central strategies may be shared, but tactics must be tailored locally to each team’s context. 

The conversation then turns to how adults actually learn. Drawing from research and stories, Vijay contrasts long, asynchronous learning journeys with the way children explore through play. He describes a familiar team exercise—the spaghetti and marshmallow tower—and explains why kids usually outperform executives: they simply start building. For leaders, the takeaway is clear. You do not have to over-design culture changes. You can invite your team into small, low-risk experiments and let them co-create better ways of working. 

To make resilience real, Vijay highlights the power of belonging, recognition, and novelty. High belonging teams can do hard things for longer, especially when they see a clear “North Star” that connects their effort to a larger purpose. He offers practical rituals leaders can implement quickly, such as “wired, tired, and inspired,” where team members briefly share what has them energized, drained, and looking ahead. Another is “five minutes of fame,” a recurring space in team meetings where colleagues give one another specific, peer-to-peer recognition. These rituals create shared experiences that act as connective tissue, deepening trust and mattering over time. 

Finally, Vijay introduces his “disruption-proof team” maturity model, a simple framework that helps leaders understand where their teams sit on a journey from stuck to resilient and adaptive. Instead of abstract labels, the model focuses on visible behaviors and basic teamwork foundations like role clarity, goal clarity, feedback cycles, and effective meetings. Leaders can take a short quiz on his website to see which stage best matches their team, then use the results to choose one or two behavior changes to focus on next. 

Throughout the episode, Dane and Vijay keep returning to a core theme: the future of work will reward teams that are both healthy and high performing. That requires leaders who can model vulnerability, set clear direction, and design everyday experiences where people feel seen, valued, and safe enough to take smart risks together.

🔗 Connect with Dr. Vijay Pendakur on LinkedIn 

🔗 Resources:Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges