 Well thank you so much for coming back, that's the first thing. So the job now over the next 35 minutes or so is we'd like to share some of the research that we've been doing on People's Center Transformation. The hope here is that the panel discussion created a desire in us to manage these tensions between optimizing the core, doing what we must, being planful, being focused, but also at the same time creating room and space and a kind of culture that allows organizations to find their new tomorrow. And so that's the work that we've been doing and I'd like to share a little bit about this tension in a video that was produced in conjunction with TED for Brightline that kind of highlights the true tension that exists between trying to both design and deliver strategy in increasingly uncertain times. Not only two minutes but hopefully it'll help set the context for what we're going to talk about today. Metaphors are powerful. We used to see the universe, our societies, companies and even our bodies as machines. The machine metaphor affected everything from how we build economies to how we treat a disease. It affects how leaders see their organizations, a hierarchical system for turning inputs into outputs, an assembly line where the plan, the strategy, the idea is handed down and the conveyor belt churns out the desired result. While that may have been a fine machine for making cars, in a world where disruption can appear with no warning, it doesn't sound like a metaphor for success. But what if we change the metaphor? What if we moved from a rigid, mechanistic view to a more fluid, dynamic metaphor? We could see an organization not as a machine but as an integrated system, a complex web that may seem chaotic from the outside but contains within it the means to respond and adapt to change. The system is not walled off but it is connected, adapting and responding to every system around it. A system that can repair itself when disrupted. A system that gets stronger, that evolves. Research has shown us that the best teams are those that are adaptive while still being focused on a common, greater goal. Teams that contain chaos to discover something amazing. Just like every cell in our body contains the same set of genetic instructions, so must a successful strategy permeate the entire organization. Strategic design and delivery are the intertwined parts of those instructions, not disconnected steps. Leaders matter. Organizations aren't machines, they are collections of people. Leaders should move beyond seeing their job as simply setting gears into motion. Instead, they should focus on balancing the health of the overall system, on adapting to changes along the way, and on connecting strategy design and delivery. So I think that video kind of encapsulates a little bit about what we were talking about on the panel, is this tension. Tension is a positive thing, it's not necessarily a negative thing, between the core and the new business, between the now and the later, between the things and the assets. And getting that alchemy right is a truly human thing. It's a people thing. And that's what we at Brightline are trying to explore in more detail. And while we're doing that, I just thought I'd rifle through some of these reports to kind of make the case about the Project Revolution. And those of you who know Antonio, he wrote this book, The Project Revolution. And if operations is about running the business, projects are about changing the business. And according to his research, at least, we're seeing a lot more change the business projects emerging, and hopefully this will back that up. If you look at the work report put out from PMI a couple of years ago, said over the next 14 years, we're going to see a 68% increase in project-oriented work activity. More and more work is going to be conducted in projects. If you look at the Navigating Complexity report also put out by PMI, those projects are actually becoming highly complex. As of that report, two years ago, 41% of projects were highly complex. So they were becoming bigger budgets, higher failure if we risked, if we didn't deliver on them. Not only that, they're becoming more strategic. So most executives, this was the pulse of the profession report, say that 50% of the organization's projects are now strategic. The other issue is that 28% of them are failing outright. That's more than a quarter. So those projects that are becoming more complex, that are more strategic, are not delivering the results that we need. And so that means we're spending a lot of money, we're wasting a lot of money due to ineffective implementation. I think Ricardo points out that this is equivalent to the GDP of his home country, Brazil. So a lot of money being wasted in driving projects towards strategic outcomes in highly complex environments with not as much success as we'd like. 88% of CEOs in an EIU report say successfully executing projects is the most important area of strategy implementation. Unfortunately, 59% of them admit that they struggle to bridge this gap between strategy design delivery. They do say that 81% of organizations rank leadership skills as most important. I think Carolyn would probably agree with that. And then cultural attitudes are identified as the number one barrier to getting it done. So at the end of the day, as I think Rick said on the panel, it's about the people. All of these charts will be made available, by the way. You're more than happy to snap at them, but they're all will be made available to you should you want them. So the people manifesto, you have a copy of this. There's a couple of things that you have. The purple book on your table is a new publication from Brightline that looks at this whole notion of transformation with some great thought and practice leaders and their insights, many of whom were up here at the panel. And then secondly, I'd like to draw your attention to this particular artifact here called the people manifesto, which was where I first had the great opportunity of connecting with Brightline. And the idea here is how do we actually get under the covers to understand what it is we have to do more better or differently or what are the next practices that we need to employ to both run the business and change the business effectively and tap into the ingenuity of people so that we can sustain the business in increasingly transient times. And so if you look at the opening remarks there, people form the link between strategy, design, and delivery. They're the entity that turn ideas into reality and more importantly they put the strategy in motion. As Rick said and as Charles had said before, organizations are nothing without people and people make the organization stop or go. So this research that I'm about to share with you is actually Brightline, I'm sorry, a dialogue has thankfully made available online. So if you like what you hear today, you can go online and you can access this content today. They've made it available online. The article I think doesn't come out till December 4th, Ben. Is that right? In the actual magazine, but it's now available online. Oh, this magazine. Oh, perfect. Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you for that. We appreciate it. So what my task was over the last five or six months is to begin a research inquiry into this people manifesto and dig into a little bit more. And I've done that very, very preliminary. You're the first people seeing it apart from what's going to come out in the article. And here's the answer. You'll notice it's not linear. It's interconnected and it's a web. And so we're taking a biological metaphor, an elemental metaphor that says the first thing is you can't necessarily change a culture, but you can nudge it. You shouldn't leave a culture to chance because left to its own devices, it'll calcify around the status quo. But what you should be doing is trying to nudge it in the direction of aspiration, tapping into the people's desires, purpose-led organizations is a big topic today. And that if you do that, people will find meaning in that aspiration and find less trouble aligning around that aspiration and unlock their discretionary effort. Now if you are successful in doing that, the next challenge though is that means you have to let go. You have to give those people autonomy to find vehicles for that energy that they've created so that they can go and do stuff. And in giving them autonomy, you also then say you have accountability for delivering. And these four things are very easy to say but incredibly hard to do in practice. And so the idea is every action you take in interacting within one of these elements of this particular performance center transformation frame is that you almost have to do the opposite of what you've traditionally done. You have to ask yourself the question, am I engaging in the right way as a leader in order to drive the outcome I'm looking forward to nudge the culture forward? And the way we're going to do this is for each element, what I've done is I've broken it down into head, heart and hands. Starting first with heart, where I've taken an inspiring quote or a piece of research from a practice thought leader. Secondly, I've got the facts. You don't get the facts till later. I've got the facts here put into packets. That's my incentive to have you come back and work on a particular area. And then thirdly, the Agile Alliances is part of the Brightline group and we've really leaned in heavily to their experience in driving change in Agile and software. And if you ever read the Agile Manifesto, they always begin with a set of values. We have come to value X over Y. So for instance, they have come to value individuals over process. So one of the reasons they believe they were successful is that they've adopted these X over Y principles that they believe have helped them be more successful in driving Agile software development. And as I hope you'll see, we have borrowed heavily from that in putting together this work. So the first thing is insights from practice and thought leaders. The second thing which you'll get after the break is data from reports and research papers. And then the third is values based behaviors to motivate change. So the way this is going to work is I'm now going to go into rapid speak and talk about what the research has shown. And then I'm going to ask you to honestly and authentically score your organization on each of these elements. And that'll become important because later I'm going to ask you to take your highest score and your lowest score and map it on the poster over there. OK. And if in doubt, please don't choose the middle. Go left or right, meaning don't just choose neither. Is there anybody who doesn't have the PCT pulse? Do you want one? Anyone else need one? Ah, a number. OK, let me hand a few more. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to let self-organization happen. And you'll pass these around. And by the time anyone on that side needs them. OK. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to, yep, they're coming, they're coming, is I'm going to go through each one of these. I'm going to explain a little bit about where it came from. And then I'm going to ask you to score after I've demonstrated some of the values. What I want to emphasize here, because I have done a drive-on on this, is I am not suggesting that managing the core business should be thrown away. What I'm suggesting is, if you're trying to push to the edge and you're trying to nudge the culture forward, these are some things you might want to value in order to do so. So we're assuming that running the core business efficiently and effectively is the current state. And what we're having to do is try to nudge the culture outside of that zone. Does that make sense? OK. So the first one. Martin Luther Kling did not say, I have a plan. Because if he said, I had a plan, we wouldn't be talking about him today. He had a dream. And he was very articulate in that dream. And what we know about human behavior is people have to believe in the achievement of a shared aspiration. And they have to believe that it's possible and worthy of their effort to make that happen. That's a prerequisite to having people change their behavior, is that they have to have a shared belief. I don't know a lot of people who have shared belief in plans, but they do have shared belief in aspiration, in dreams, in shared endeavor. And so the first piece of the equation is you have to communicate a compelling change narrative. People need to know why, to quote Simon Sinner. So if that's true, as leaders, we have to, borrowing again from the Agile Alliance, do the following. We have to value the shared aspiration over the required action. We have to value the possible future over the problematic present. And we have to value the purposeful why over the actionable what and how. Again, going from the core to the edge, borrowing from our friends at Agile Alliance, this is what we have to value if what we're trying to do is nudge the culture in the direction of aspiration, alignment, autonomy, and accountability. So, question number one. On your survey, please rate your organization. On the following, our leaders communicate a clear, concise, and consistent, and compelling narrative that makes a purposeful, passionate, and emotionally resonant case for change. And when I say leaders, I mean leaders, the first line leader all the way up to the executive. I think of leadership as a system. How strongly would you rate your organization on that? Give you one more minute. We have to move down the learning curve. Then we can move quickly, but all of these assets will be made available afterwards, so feel free to jot it down on the actual sheet. OK. Are we OK on that? Item number two. Gandhi said, you have to be the change you wish to see in the world. And if you look at Hermione Abara's research, she argues that leaders who deliberately act their way into a new way of thinking, rather than thinking their way into a new way of acting, are more successful not only in changing their own behavior, but motivating change behavior in others. So if we need to be the change we want to see, there's a couple of things we have to start to value. Number one, we have to demonstrate change behavior over demanding change behavior. As a parent, this is a pretty hard one. When my kid says stop watching TV, or when I say to my kid stop watching TV, and my kid says, well, you watch TV all the time. So what we say speaks far more loudly and eloquently than what we do speaks far more loudly and eloquently than what we say. So how can we actually expect somebody to change their behavior in a different direction if we don't model it ourselves? I think Carolyn mentioned that in her research too. We have to be authentic and open over being authoritarian and overbearing. I don't know the answer. We have to figure it out. But wait, they'll think I'm weak. We have to try and learn over thinking plan. We have to value trying and learning over thinking and planning. So in order to act and think differently, I'd like you to score your organization on the following. Our leaders generate respect and followership from others by personally, authentically, and openly modeling the change beliefs and behaviors required to evolve the organization. How well do your leaders act to think differently? Are we down the curve now? Again, I'm talking about moving from core business out. These are the non-obvious ways we, as a leadership system, might have to behave by having different values in order to move the needle. Next, embrace situational humility. This is Mary Parker Follett, and she wrote this in 1922, I believe. Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power, but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led, different framing on power. We tend to think about position, reward, and coercive power as the kind of way we drive organizational change, which is something we talked about earlier. What we know from Amy Emerson's work is that leaders have to embrace situational humility. We don't know all the answers. If we claim to know all the answers, we're being inauthentic, particularly in the world we live in today. So instead, we should show vulnerability. We should seek help. We should ask questions, and we should demonstrate that failure is acceptable, something I know that was talked about here in the panel. So humility builds a foundation of trust and psychological safety that gives others the confidence to engage in open, transparent, and authentic interactions around the change. I think Martin talked about this, that we don't impose change on people. We want people to be motivated to engage around change. If we don't create the milieu within which they can openly and authentically talk about it, how can we expect them to want to adopt it? So the values we have to think about here are showing vulnerability over projecting power, asking questions over mandating direction, making failure safe over playing it safe. If what we're trying to do is nudge the culture towards aspiration, alignment, autonomy, and accountability, so that the organization can be more nimble, more flexible, act more like an organism, these are some of the things we have to think about to nudge it in that direction. So again, for your organization, please rank the following. Our leaders show vulnerability, seek help, demonstrate that failure is acceptable, and consistently seek to increase the autonomy and accountability of others. How well is your organization doing on that scale? Okay, we're down the curve now, so I'm just gonna keep going. Steve Jobs, famously when he came back to Apple, drew a two by two on the board and said there's consumer, and there's enterprise, and there's laptop, and there's PC. In that he killed a number of projects that he's very good friends were part of, he even killed a project named after his own daughter, the Apple Lisa. And so his argument is that focus is not about saying yes, it's about saying no. To reduce collaborative overload, this is Rob Cross's research, leaders must adopt a portfolio based approach to change by ensuring that people's energy and attention is squarely focused on the vital few change initiatives that matter most. Otherwise we tend to over collaborate, stretch ourselves too thin, and suffer from change fatigue. In order to do this, we have to value saying no over letting it go. We know that we let too many projects go for too long. We have to be more disciplined in saying no sooner. Rootless prioritization over holding options, not saying we never hold options, but are we holding onto options too long just because we don't wanna get it wrong? We don't wanna fail. And then another big thing is Daniel Goldman's latest research is that time isn't the variable, focus to tension is the variable that matters most. So are we really focusing attention over just simply measuring action? Those are three things we might want to value as leaders in organizations if we're trying to nudge the culture forward. So for your organization, our leaders bring clarity and focus by prioritizing and communicating the key strategic priorities that matter most to the business. How well does your organization score on that particular variable? Halfway there, almost halfway there. Next, motivate discretionary effort. This gentleman may not be familiar to a lot of you. His name is Vince Lombardi. He's a very well-known football coach, American football coach. I know it shouldn't be called football, but that's a different story for a different day. His quote here is that individual commitment to a group effort is what makes a teamwork, it's what makes a company work, and it's what makes a society work. And so what we know is we have to unlock the discretionary effort of people, and that we do that not through extrinsic levers, but through intrinsic ones. Discretionary effort is that magical fuel where people do things that they're not told to. They do it because they want to, because they believe it's the right thing to do. We see this a lot in crises. Brightline brought out a really nice paper on why is it that when we are in an emergency situation, people tend to just automatically operate at a different level? And the argument is because they have a shared sense of purpose, that lives are at stake, and that they will work with and through each other to address those challenges. So we have to look at the intrinsic motivational levers that compel people to go the extra mile, and we do that by tapping into their aspirations and giving them autonomy in return for accountability. We have to know what motivates them, and then make sure that they find meaning in the work of the enterprise, and make that forge that connection through a motivational aspect, not through a fear aspect. So what do we have to value if we want to motivate discretionary effort, if we want to unlock this fuel source inside the enterprise? One, we have to look at channeling aspiration over mandating direction. Secondly, we have to motivate inspiration over manipulating with fear. And thirdly, we have to value recognizing effort, even if it fails, over requiring conformity. Again, these are the baselines, but the other side is where we have to stretch to. So for number five, how well do you rate on the following? Our leaders understand how to motivate discretionary effort by tapping into the aspirations of others and giving them the autonomy in return for accountability to achieve it. How well do your leaders do that today? Number six, agency is a two-way street. Power comes with responsibility and accountability. This is Charlene Lee's most recent research. Organizations that give people agency, which she defines as the permission to take independent action or make changes without approval are far more likely to succeed in organization transformation. What we find is that the decision-making cycle gets really, really slow in organizations if there's too much centralized command and control, and that creates too much inertia for the organization to be able to adapt as fast as it needs to. So if we really are going to give others agency and people leaders have a hard time with this, they have to value give and take reciprocity over top-down hierarchy, and that's hard if you're at the top of the hierarchy. They have to value encouraging independent action over requiring prior permission, and they have to value giving agency over exercising authority. So next test. Number six, our leaders create agency by giving others the permission to take independent actions and make changes without hierarchical approval. How does your organization fare in that particular element? We're in the home stretch now. Number seven, it's the Peter Drucker form. We can't not quote Peter Drucker, and so one of my favorite. In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. Evidence? So Roger Martin, who I think has written something in this particular, if not in this one in the prior book that was put out by Breiline, he envisions organizations as decision factories, and he argues that leaders should only make the choices they are best equipped to make and pass the others along. So if you think about organizations as decision factories and then you think about speed of decision making as a variable that matters, maybe one of those leading variables that Rita was talking about earlier on, we might have to kind of come to value some different things. For instance, we might want to value a person's experience and expertise over their position and role when we're dealing with a particular complex situation that we don't know much about. Some interesting experiments I ran many years ago is I would put people into a virtual reality environment where they would not know who the leaders were. I would mask their voices, and I would give a set of decisions. And then I would run it in the real world where we knew what the hierarchical structure was. It's very interesting, but those decisions were quite different, and the ones where we didn't know who was in charge ended up being better decisions. If we are going to make decisions, it's really important that we explain the rationale for those decisions rather than just expecting agreement. We might think they're the most wonderful choice that we've ever made strategically, but unless the people understand the why behind it and the rationale, we can't just expect them to blindly take it and expect agreement with it. We need to give them the space to have a conversation. And the last thing is we've got to cascade decisions over centralizing them, because if we centralize them, we sink into the vortex. There's ample research that shows that if, you know, the simple question you can ask in an organizational network analysis is, if I had more access to this person, I would be a lot more productive in my work. And when you do that work, Rob Cross has done this work, Steve Garcia has done this work, it's all about the leaders. It's all about the leaders who aren't willing to let go of control and decision-making, and they actually slow down the flow of decision-making within the organization. Okay, how well does your organization or do your leaders only make the choices they are best equipped to make, clarify the choices others have to make, and the boundaries within which to make them? How strong is your decision cascade in your organization today? Are we okay? Next one. This is John Cotter. John's well-known for his work on the Eight Steps of Change, but most recently his work has been focused on something he calls Accelerate. And his argument today is very similar, I think to what was discussed here on the panel, is that we kind of, we have to run a dual operating system in our organizations. On the one side, we need the hierarchy that is maximized for efficiency and profit in the core business, but on the other, we need some kind of network, some kind of ecosystem, some kind of non-hierarchical social relationship type structure that can allow us to find the new tomorrow. And so leaders have to exercise their position, power and influence to override the traditional hierarchy because that's the basic model and create the time and space for cross-functional teams to emerge, converge and engage around critical strategy design delivery interfaces. So here, the very people who are within the hierarchy have to actually create air cover to allow room for teams to emerge and converge rather than just appointing them, allowing the time and space for that autonomous unit to emerge and say we feel we have an answer to this particular challenge that we don't know the answer to, but we feel that we can go out and test and learn on that, will you give us the cover to do so outside the hierarchy? Now to do that as leaders, you have to catalyze the network. And if you're going to catalyze the network, you have to value things like informal networks over organization hierarchies. You have to value things like organizational network analysis over organization restructuring. Organization restructuring is kind of, companies suffer from something I call responsiveness lag. It's like we come in, most senior executives within three years will reorg the company because it's a tangible structural lever that they can drive and say, yep, we're reorganizing and we're going to reorganize around whatever. Go to market or we're going to product or something like that. Meanwhile, they don't realize, as Michael's point, is they were in an ecosystem and by the time they're done restructuring and they try to harden that structure, the landscape has evolved to where they need to move again. And so why do we spend so much time with that when what we could be doing is kind of tapping into the discretionary effort of people and allowing them to go where they're motivated to make change within this new ecosystem landscape. And so therefore we need to create this space for emergent collaborative teaming, self-organized, as opposed to assigned cross-functional teams. We need someone from IT, someone from HR, someone from blah, blah, blah, to get in here and solve the problem. So we're assuming through functional representation that we might solve a problem when what we're really looking for is motivation. How many of us have been on a cross-functional team that we think totally sucks? Nobody's raised their hand. Two people have raised their hand. If I ask people in organizations, they all put up their hand and say it's over collaboration. I'm asked to go to too many of these meetings. It's not worth the hill of beans and I'm only here because I'm from HR or IT or insert shared services here. So number eight, our leaders create the time and space for cross-functional teams to emerge, converge and engage around crucial strategy, design, delivery interfaces. Where do you get the time and space to address things that really matter to the organization that they haven't figured out yet? Two more, two more. Next, Peter Senghi. Peter obviously has done a lot of work in learning organizations, but most recently he's been looking at systems leadership. And so his argument is real change starts with recognizing we're part of the systems we seek to change. We're not outside of it. There's this thing called leadership attribution error. What Kellerman talks about, where we tend to kind of attribute everything to the leader. And it's clear, Rick is a fantastic leader, but I think he'd be the first to say it's not all him. In fact, that came up in the panel. And so as leaders, we're not outside of the change, we're actually part of the change. Therefore, leadership, like everything else, is a system. And so Peter believes that we need a new kind of leader, a systems leader, to catalyze the collaborative leadership required to successfully navigate dynamic and complex systemic change. If we're dealing with a system, we have to operate as a system, not as a linear hierarchy. If we're gonna do that to lead the system, we've gotta think about systemic collective leadership over functional hierarchical leadership. We've gotta think about catalyzing and guiding change over controlling and monitoring compliance. We gotta think about adaptive leadership systems over technical leadership practices. So that's lead the system. How well do your leaders catalyze the collaborative leadership required to successfully navigate dynamic, complex, and systemic change? We always save the best for last, and so the last is about nudging the culture. Culture is famously intractable, very difficult to address, but we also know we can't leave it up to chance. I had the, I was about to say good fortune. I'm not sure if it's good fortune or not, but I lived through IBM's transformation when Lou Gersner was there, and when Lou was done with that transformation, he wrote a book, and that book was called Teaching the Elephant How to Dance. And the book was largely about culture, and in that, he said, "'I came to see in my time at IBM, "'culture isn't just one aspect of the game, "'it's the game.' "'And the reason it's the game "'is because culture can be a limiting "'and restrictive force to the design "'and delivery of a strategic change initiative, "'and while culture itself is really hard to change, "'we know we can't leave it to chance "'cause otherwise it kind of regresses to the status quo.'" So if we're gonna nudge the culture, we have to really lean into the human and emotional side of the change rather than just the technical-rational one. Technical-rational one's easy, we can point to it. We've changed the process, we've implemented a structure, we're making progress, but what does that mean for the human beings, which is the whole purpose for this conversation? We have to focus on each element of the People's Center transformation model rather than saying let's change the culture. You can't go directly at culture. You have to go at the antecedents of culture and nudge it in the direction you want it to go. And then, stealing my own thunder, you have to nudge the culture over leaving it to chance. So the final question for your organization, our leaders consciously and continuously nudge the culture in the direction of aspiration, alignment, autonomy, and accountability. How well are you doing on that? All right, I had to take my jacket off now because we're about to have 50 human beings stand up and do something and I may have to run out of the room, okay? Because it's always dangerous. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is I'm gonna ask you to look at your scores, okay? And wherever you've scored lowest, I want you to circle that one, meaning more to the left. And wherever you've scored highest, I want you to circle that one. So you should have two, well, if you have two that you've scored low or two that you've scored high, I want you for now to pick a tiebreaker. I want you to pick the one that you think deserves more attention. Got it? So you would have one that you would claim your organization does well, meaning you're leaning towards strongly agree, and you get one that perhaps you don't do as well on, leaning towards strongly disagree. Let me see, is there anybody who does not have two circles on their sheet? Great, now, here's the hard part or the easy part. Up here, we have the PCT map. And what I'm gonna ask you to do is I'm gonna ask you to come up, you get one green sticky, what's that for? Yeah, that's for the good one. And if you think you're good, you put that on the left side of the particular element. Does that make sense? And similarly, for the one that you don't think you're great at, you put it on the right side. And I'm gonna say go, and then you're all gonna magically stand up. And within the next three minutes, we'll have a collective picture of our people-centered transformation pulse. Wait, is there anything I didn't give in my directions that I should have so that this will happen flawlessly? Because I'm not, as Martin Reeves knows, the most organized person in the world. Is it clear? You should have a high and a low, yes? Repeat it, it's always good to repeat. For your highest score, take green and put it on the left-hand side of the element that you scored highest. For your lowest score, take red and put it on the right-hand side of the element. And don't forget, nudge the culture is up here. Are we up to this challenge? It's the hardest thing we'll have to do all day. On your marks, get set, go. Left side for positive, right side for opportunity. Survey. Okay, great. If you just stay there, you'll just be there. So does that make sense? Yes, it does. Stretch. Okay, here's the objective, this is what we need. But it was a huge, in many ways, it was a huge change effort because the people at Ericsson had the applications, they were proprietary, built on kind of a monolithic platform. And we were bringing an open system environment to the table on which other people, as you know, usually in the first round. Has everybody voted? Yes? I'm gonna bring my little handy-dandy worksheet over here then. So how are we doing? What do people see? Any thoughts? Anybody? This group can't see, so let me pull this over here. A little further. It looks like if we just count numbers, decentralizing decision-making seems to be a little bit of a, both, some people say they're doing it well, even number. Four say they're doing it well, four say not so much. One person can't follow directions. I'm just kidding, I'm Irish, it's humor, but it should be over here, okay? It's a rubric, it's actually a poor template. I labored last night with coloring one side green and one side red. Yeah, so this is the person we should actually hire, because they're the outlier, right? We shouldn't, everybody else, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we call that positive deviance. We wanna look for the positive deviance in our organization. So I think that there's some energy around decentralizing decision-making. It looks like there's a little bit of energy about embracing situations of humility, which means get over yourself as a leader, own your vulnerability, those kind of things. And then giving others agency. So I'm gonna take those three, and then I'm gonna catalyze the network, because there's a lot of people saying, what the heck is that? And there's two people who say, oh, I know. So we'll use that one as well. And then focus on the few, which is this challenge of how can I, one side of the equation be we, this is what we really have to focus on for change, but then it changes. I think the idea here is you have to make as few of those changes as possible, and you have to focus on as few things as possible. Otherwise, as Rob Cross has shown, we get into collaborative overload. So what I'm gonna suggest is that we do this one, this one, this one, this one, and anyone got real strength of wanting to go for another one. This is your chance. Anyone? All right, I'm gonna say embrace situation of humility. So what I'd like us to do now is give others agency, which is number six, let me do this, there. So now you have a map. Number six is give others agency. I want people to convene in this part of the room, okay? Another human task. I appreciate you going with me. We can't move the tables, so we have to move the people. Yeah, there's a lesson in that. So number six, give others agency. If you're interested in having a conversation about that, move to this part of the room. Number three, embrace situational humility. I want you to move into this area of the room. Make sense? Number, so I've done that one, I've done that one. Number four, focus on the few. I want you to just convene in the middle front area there. And number seven, decentralize decision-making. I'd like you to convene over on that side. And last but not least, number eight, is it? Catalyze the network. I'd like you to convene over here. Now why do I want you to do this? I'll tell you why. Because I've got little packets for you that share the research about what we know. And also, we have people who have ideas that they could share. So I have goodies to give out. But the first thing I need is for you to organize. And when you're all, like I'll say I'm in group six or I'm in group three, I want you all to raise your hand when you've gathered. Does that make sense? Are we up for that task? Should I repeat that? Here's the map and where I'd like you to get together. When you're all done and you say I'm here for agency or I'm here for network, I want you all to raise your hands. That way I know everybody has self-organized into the part of the room that makes sense for them. Are we ready? On your marks, get set, go. When you've gathered, I want you to raise your hands just so I know that we've got the group. Six is give others agency. Three is in this area here. Six, just go to that end there and three will organize here. You gotta go to the edge. It's all about being in the edge. Oh no, no, sorry, sorry, I'm wrong. Six is where they should be. Three should be there. I actually drew it backwards. I apologize. Hands up. You're three. This group. Six. Six. We got three people who are interested in. Okay. Over here. Seven. And this group. This group. Eight, okay. All right. This group. You're three with these people. You have to climb over the table. Oh, four. Oh, focus on a few. Got it. All right, can I have your attention? There's two ways we can do this. We could just let you discuss, but I'd like to, shh, if I may, I'd like to bring a little bit of structure to this. Okay, so what I'd like you to do in your teams is like you to point in the air. Point in the air. Okay. Group six, you're not pointing in the air. Or group three. Group three, point in the air. Point in the air, yeah. What wound are they working on? They're working on embracing situation of humility over there. Okay, is everybody pointing in the air? All right, here's your task. I want you to as quickly and deliberately as possible point to your leader. Go. All right. Do we have leaders? Let me see. Show of hands, is there a leader? We have a leader. A reluctant leader, but we have a leader. We have a leader? Do we have a leader? Everyone? Okay, so leaders, your job is to come up and tell me what your topic is and I will hand you a packet, okay? Leaders, come on up and tell me what group you're in and I will hand you a packet. Does everybody have a leader, a sheet, and some of the research? All right, leaders, here's the task. And I'm gonna give you some times here. Here we go. We've already selected the PCD element to work on. We've assigned a leader. So what I'd like you to do is you have packets that I've handed out that kind of give you the quote, give you a little bit of research. Individually, what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to jot down what you think before you start talking. This is a nominal group technique. I want you to quietly and individually jot down what I think we need to do more, better or differently to nudge this element forward. And any next practices you're aware of. So what I'd like to do is channel Simon and Garfunkel, Sound of Silence. I'm gonna give us four minutes of silence to review the material and write down individually what we think we might do more better differently. Then, leaders, it's your chance to shine. You will then be tasked with synthesizing that and putting it onto the template. So what do we collectively think about more better differently and next practices? And just to add some pressure leaders, you then have to give us a two minute readout so everybody can learn from everybody else. But because you're the leader, you can delegate that responsibility should you choose to. Is it clear? Four minutes, quietly review the packets, think independently about what you wanna do more better differently in what the next practices are, and then it'll be up to the leaders to synthesize. Your time starts now. Individually, take a look at the material, what you have to do more better differently and next practices, go. Okay, for you extroverts who are exploding to wanna talk, we have about 90 more seconds and then we will let it rip. Okay, leaders, your task now over the next seven minutes is to hear from the group and see what we collectively agree or somebody thinks is a good idea and capture it on your template here. That's why I gave you the Sharpie, is to kind of capture the wisdom of the group, if you will, around what you have to do more better differently with respect to that element and any next practices that organizations have found successful. And then you can either prepare or delegate a two minute readout of what we did. And it'll be just that, more better differently in next practices. Are you ready? Seven minutes begins now, go. Okay, leaders, I am gonna go get the panelists, they're gonna come back in for the readouts, so you decide whether you wanna present or delegate. You guys wanna come up? Okay, leaders, are you ready? We have reconvened our panelists, so now we're turning the tables, so they're gonna get to hear from you a little bit. We do have a strict time limit, so I'm gonna keep you to your two minute readout and then I'm gonna ask our, can I have your attention? And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask the panelists to respond, we're gonna call that a lightning round, and we're done, okay? So the process is as follows, we're going to have two minute team readouts, where essentially what I'm gonna ask you to do is just summarize, this was our element, we believe we have to do x, y, z more better differently and some next practices we should consider are boom, very much just the facts. What I don't want is well, we had a really good conversation and so-and-so likes windsurfing. That's not what we're, we're just about the facts at this point in time, given what we have to do. Who would like to go first? Okay, Ben Walker is going to go first, and you're gonna tell us your element, more better differently, and next practices. Let's say I'm not the leader, I'm just summarizing. Okay, so what do you, must we do more of? Testing and prototype, it's focusing on the few. So what must we do more of? More testing, more prototyping, and having an effective strategic priority meetings, and what we mean by effective is ones that reduce the amount of priorities rather than add to the amount of priorities. What must we do better? More ongoing assessment, more communications and better ideation processes, and what must we do more differently and what moves me differently, speaking to Steve Jobs' thing, is we've got to be a little bit more ruthless, more disciplined about stopping things that no longer work, and also limiting the ability of one individual to continue to work on a project that actually is not in the priorities of the organization or its clients. In terms of next practices, I'll get it in 30, we think clear ideation process, ruthless ongoing assessment, all wrapped up in design thinking principles. Well done, next. Give us your element, more better differently. How to catalyze the network, and actually I'm going to, so it's catalyzing the network, and we were all really poor at this, so there's a lot of room for improvement, and I actually want to hand over the mic to two of our members on the team. So one came all the way from Japan and had a very interesting take on implementing Western cultures. Okay, I think that the strength of Japanese cooperation was informal network, actually the community within the company. So when I was young, although I worked for marketing, but I was assigned to a technology department or the manufacturing department to know each other, that's really important, so I knew almost everybody, business, so cross-functional team was easy to do, but when we adopted the Western style of management, such kind of culture and community deteriorated. So how we can establish something new is very important. And then we had another very radical approach to me, at least, John, you did something quite different? So yeah, one of the things we found was when you refer to an operations team or a finance team, they all huddled together, and they all worked together very nicely and that's good, but it doesn't solve the problems that we actually have in the organization. So we've started getting rid of those concepts of teams and instead we hand problems into the organization and whoever is available, capable and interested can naturally form a team around that problem to see what happens. It's not perfect yet. And the third observation relates to an article in the latest edition of Harvard Business Review where they actually gave people tracking devices and saw how the informal networks were actually mapped and then they rearranged the formal setting of the office space. So it could be like Steve Jobs he did when he designed the Pixar building, having the coffee stands and yeah, the drinking fountains and the toilets in the middle of the building. So that could also be a way of encouraging cross-pollination from different branches. Three great stories there that talk about catalyzing the network. Who would like to go next? Gobi. So our element was decentralizing decision making and we combined really more better and differently together and we realized we need to be clear about the decision maker and what that means, what the responsibilities of that are to create more of a common language in our organization around decision making. So whether that's a framework that we adopt or several frameworks so people are clear on the roles they play. We have to generally create more psychological safety because we might have those things but then people are scared to actually make the decision because the last thing we also need to do is better understand the consequences and are there such things as good decisions and bad decisions? Are there just decisions that have impact and what are the consequences of those outcomes? The practices were an idea of visualizing work that if we were in a manufacturing plant it would be quite easy potentially to see where something's breaking down but in the knowledge economy it's hard to see. So how do we visualize the work that's getting done and the decision hurdles along the way? Creating more experimentation and rapid prototyping so we can make decisions and then quickly see what the impact are and then increasing access to data and transparency or the matching process of getting the decision maker the information he or she needs in order to make the decision. Thank you Gobi, round of applause for that team. Okay, we're done on this side of the room so we must move to this side of the room and we have to go quickly because we need to hear from Rick before he exits stage left. So our element was giving others agency and what we thought we need to do more of was creating more entrepreneurial structures particularly that encourage people to own the whole outcome rather than just a slice of the pie. We need to create some clear constraints and guardrails so we know the extent of our responsibility but we have freedom within those particular guardrails and constraints and leaders need to provide backup and also make sure that learning happens. So then what we need to do better there's something about rewarding collaboration we talked about incentivization as well we need to communicate better and then what we need to do differently is how we fund projects and the expectations that we have of returns on them funding and then how we set KPIs and OKRs and then next practices leaders need to ask so we had a couple of examples from our participants one was in having more informal meetings where there's constant reinforcement of the accountability that's given to the team and encouraging the right set of behaviors and another example was rather than the leader taking the decision themselves asking their team to say OK so this is the situation what decision would you take and why and getting more authentic ideas from that. Johns Hopkins which is a medical teaching hospital in the United States has the lowest mortality rates and the highest satisfaction and they approach things that way which is socratic they only ask questions they don't tell what the response is. Last but not least. So our group was exploring embracing situational humility and I'll keep it short and sweep because of time so I'll just mention our next practices that we suggested so we thought kind of like the previous group before us that we need more informal conversations so that people are really able to show their true personalities and that will also help provide the kind of emotional level. We also thought about kind of embracing failure so a few companies that we know of they do these failure nights and it's a great possibility to show that failure is OK and really something that we can embrace and something that is celebrated in a way because you can get so many better practices from failures than just showcasing the best practices themselves. We also thought that top management really needs to kind of showcase that they also fail and to highlight to employees well OK if they fail then we can also talk about our own failures and then show personal interest so yeah that was our group. Thank you. Round of applause for that team. Rick Goings we promise to have you out by 520 so the floor is yours. Any response to what you heard given your experience about how we advance people center transformation. Firstly I think your takeaways were just terrific so I should have stayed in the room and listened to most of your takeaways. Comment mostly about what I just heard last to what I'm really thrilled to hear is the people side of this. Interesting too I said when I was with Ricardo as team in New York they give you your they read your CV and your big introduction and all the things your platitudes awards etc and I really said to the audience that I really ought to be I did full disclosure I said what they don't talk enough about is your failures your face plants your flops because once you get by that and I guess I'm older now and have more resources now it's easier for me to spend more time talking about those because those are the kinds of things where I learn most and I've tried to in leadership position created environment where people could in fact fail where the atmosphere at the organization yeah you play to win rather than play not to lose and I heard that resonated throughout the organization out there so that when you come up with people that they take chances you basically have an attitude that you design it you launch it in a learning laboratory because I always say learning laboratory because you're allowed to tweak it if it's in the laboratory then what you do is you fix it and then you scale it up once people understand that's natural parts of it every one of the ones I knew who are really great went through those periods and I find they talk about it more so it's a thrill to hear these kinds of things from you all. Thank you Rick, yeah appreciate that. Carolyn, words of wisdom. Oh you can use that. Okay so great session this afternoon, thank you very much. For me it's the main key takeaways that's really about people and mindsets so that's what's the session about but that's mainly what we need to focus on and this is on two dimension we need to have the right leaders and we need to have the right staff and the organization and in order to achieve that we do not have to fire everyone so I think there are a lot of different possibilities to achieve that and there are four dimensions I would like to highlight so first of all you can re-skill your employees and re-skill yourself and that's very important never stop learning always be a student of life and learn and achieve your advanced capabilities. The second one you can redeploy also the tasks that you have in your organizations maybe the tasks how you structure them do not fit the future anymore and do not fit the competencies of your employees so then you can think about redeploying it taking it apart and putting it together in another way so that it makes sense for your employees then obviously you can also hire new people that bring a different mindset into the organization and then finally you also have the possibility to get rid of some people that really don't want to change but this is only the measure you shouldn't really take I think you can do a lot with re-skilling and you should really focus on re-skilling your employees re-skilling yourself and be a role model just one more story on that when I did my interviews like for one organization the board member of a big large media company they wanted to get to or they hired people for senior position and then they had two really great candidates and then they asked the two candidates like it was the CEO position okay would you be willing to go because they both weren't really good in coding and then they said would you be willing to go like three months to Columbia to do a training seminar on coding and then this one guy said well yeah you know I actually I know everything I don't really think that I need to do that and the other said yes I would love to do that because I know I have I don't know enough and I would really like to do that and then they said the board said okay we're gonna take that one who's willing to learn because even if you are CEO you still need to learn and you need to show that to your team thank you very much. Martin, words of wisdom on PCT? So a lot of common themes seems to be experimentation and tolerance and failure I wanted to share an idea on extending that so I think if you replace the word failure by accidents some interesting ideas emerge so you know if you're successful obviously an advice to concede that you know what exactly what you planned happened you know often success is more mysterious than failure a lot of things have to align so if you treat your successes like accidents and you say well how did the stars line up and you trace back the causality you actually there are as richer learnings as with an experimentation system also you know talk about prioritization I think you know companies have deficits different pathologies of in terms of deficits of creativity sometimes it's an excess of ideas you know so you need prioritization sometimes it's actually a deficit in which case you need more divergence and sometimes the answer is managerial and sometimes it's anti managerial you know sometimes it's more top down divergence more bottom up divergence so I think being specific about you know is our idea is our organization hyperactive managerially you know hyperactive in terms of ideas or the opposite and then designing the accident production and reflection system appropriately is important and then the final connection is one with diversity I think you know if you think about either a plan or an experimental process it seems like a very deliberate hard work process on if you look at the mathematics of landscapes this is the idea of a downward a downhill move a downhill move is something which is effortless because it's just natural to the people involved and the thing about diversity is you know my mental landscape we're looking at the same reality but my interpretation of the landscape is different from yours so my downhill move what is trivial to me is not trivial to you so I think cognitive diversity is very important in producing an organization that never gets stuck on a local optimum you know the two requirements basically one of them is have cognitive diversity in the organization the other one is keep it in motion so you know keep disturbing it so you don't get that sort of functional lock-in that somebody over there talked about so one of the things that struck me as I was listening to your observations is the importance of stories and the importance of symbolism and I don't think we talk enough about symbolism at an executive level so what is a symbol? A symbol is something that has meaning in people's minds regardless of its inherent substance and I think every leader in the room has had this experience you do something because to you it's just complete common sense you know you move people down the hall because I've got to be working together and within you know 15 nanoseconds the entire organization is up in arms because that person was supposed to get the next opening with a window and this person is too junior and you know you're astonished by the interpretations people make of what your intentions were so I think it's super important to pay attention to the meaning that you create in other people's minds and I think the way that you do that well one way that you do that is through stories you know and we heard a couple of them already today one of my favorite stories is about the early days of the Macintosh computer and of course Steve Jobs was a master at symbolism and reportedly he was upset with how slowly it was booting and he said to the development team you know this thing is gonna be used by tens of millions of people and if you could get it to boot more quickly it'd be like saving tens of millions of lifetimes over the time that people are gonna be doing this and I think that's just a kind of memorable thing that creates meaning in people's minds about what we're actually working on. Last quick symbol example is from Lou Gersner who used this in his transformation at IBM and he said about symbolic action he said you know it takes an awful lot of feathers to make a critical mess of feathers. So I was struck not only by very interesting observations but also by how our lenses may differ and capture different parts of reality even for us as commentators so I was thinking about that when Caroline was giving her own description because her focus was in the role of the individuals when my mind was going exactly the opposite way and I guess to some extent I'd like to say to think about how we each come to that with her own biases and preferences and mine may be a little bit more structural so I'll speak about structural not to discount the importance of individuals but building also on what both Rita and Martin were saying I heard not about individuals that are the ones that are going to drive success or failure but the context where individuals work which drives success and failure. I do not and that's a personal view I think that we may be confusing symptom and causes when we think that it's a problem of the individuals. I think we create the context whereby people make decisions and the way that I read all that I heard is how can we create the right context to make the decisions that are going to be useful i.e. what do we need to change so that people do the right stuff and I think that to me this is quite important and it touches on the danger of tribalism that I see rampant in society and of course this is in politics and this is in business the innovators and non-innovators the Brexiteers and the Remainers in the UK well the question is what do people do in different contexts what are the decisions that we give them and what I heard you guys say is let's think about the principles that will allow us to ensure that we take the right decisions I heard a lot about the need for transparency so pretty much all of the groups wanted to have a more transparent way in which the decisions or the principles that are followed are taken so that's one thing that got across the second thing that I heard was flexibility i.e. the need not to take the existing structures for granted and be able to examine them but again this is not just examining people this is examining the structures and if someone is abusing the position drawing on the structure that they're at you can call them out and to me that takes me to the next meta level observation that I had that cut across pretty much everything that I heard which is accountability and I think that there is a desire for us to look at the accountability for why we're doing what we're doing and the possibility of discussing it saying well hang on a minute there the world's changing let's see what we're all trying to do as a group and let's find the best possible way of achieving it collectively now to me that raises a couple of further issues the first thing is how do you do that and I think that this is where the comments of both Martin and Rita sort of sounded very complimentary in a way you do that by not only explaining a rule book but by translating it into stories that are easy to comprehend and that people understand by example by allegory by what can motivate them and also you think about what is the problem that you have to solve in a somewhat more sophisticated way which is my way of boiling down part of what Martin is saying it leaves one more issue which to me is probably the trickiest issue Martin alluded to that as well which is the issue of the architecture by we need to figure out how the teams will decide what the remit is there's an existential question here what the heck are we solving what is each individual unit going to do how are we dividing it between the partly overlapping and partly collaborating units that we get and this is where strategy meets organizational structure this is where we have to have a sense of what the general purpose is and how the environment is changing to tie us all the way to the very beginning and the stuff that I was speaking about and then see how do we match the organization in order for us to have the subunits which can have all these wonderful properties that we set but there is this architecting whose principles I think are ones that we discussed like the principles that Martin was saying that I think that we need to think about and it's exciting because this is where I think the current thinking is how to match these two environment business changing the way that we will architect the teams are changing and that connects to the individual decisions made we have a lot of things to thank first and foremost thank you to Brightline for hosting this we really, really appreciate it there is lots of materials that Brightline has on their site and all of them many of you asked about the charts well make sure anyway I'd like you to thank your leaders for your great job so thank you for that next there are insights at the beginning but also for closing in for the lightning round thank you panel for your brilliant model thank you very much and enjoy the moment