 All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Let's Discuss with Parsons TKO. It's a super exciting episode for us, episode 8. We have our first featured guest with us today, so I'm super excited. Carolyn Solaris, and we're going to be talking about transformation and change and sort of the whole broad scope of what that can encompass. As always, we post these on our website. We post these on LinkedIn. They're on YouTube. We would love to start hearing from the audience. If you have comments or feedback, Carolyn would like to hear too. Just send us, put some comments in there after this. Let us know if this helped you at all or put any thoughts in your head that you might want to share with us. We'd be excited to hear that. As always, I'm your host, Tony Cappecini from Parsons TKO, and I am so happy to introduce my LinkedIn buddy. I met Carolyn via my mother-in-law who pointed me out to her articles on LinkedIn, and I just kept thinking, oh my god, wow, this person thinks right in the space that I always really enjoy talking about and thinking about too, and it turns out we actually met and then started talking remotely. So, Carolyn? Well, thanks so much for inviting me, Tony. As you know, it's been a really fun opportunity to get to know each other, and the fact that the world is so small that we could connect by LinkedIn, I think is crazy. And probably a lesson for everybody heading into the new year, that the value of your network is critical at this point in time, and so I will keep posting, and hopefully you'll keep reading, and we can go from there. So let me introduce myself a little bit. So I am the managing partner and founder of my company, Murphy Merton, and I'm really known for three things. So at the organizational level, I help bring big, messy, hairy ideas into tangible, concrete outputs so that the strategy really gets translated. At a team level, I'm often called in to help teams that are trying to get a project off the ground or a project that might be stuck for a variety of the reasons I think we're going to discuss today as we talk about transformation. And last but certainly not least at the individual level, and I've been teasing about this, but I help people feel better about work. I think we're at a very unique point in history, and what's happening at work is there are a lot of people feeling the churn, and it's not a joke or a coincidence that we're talking about transformation, and that's pretty messy, and it's scary, and it's very uncertain. And so if I can do anything to help alleviate some of that stress or angst, I do that too. Yes, I mean that is awesome. Thank you. How would how would folks find you online? Sure, so a couple of ways. Obviously, Carolyn Solaris at LinkedIn and also my website, murphymerton.com. Those are a couple of areas. I'm on Facebook as well, so the usual social media channels. I do love LinkedIn because it's so easy for professionals, I think, to be connecting and something we all need to be doing. I left my own corporate career about a year and a half ago and didn't have any idea of the power of these tools to connect us professionally. And so if I can give that to any of you out there, I think it's a great lesson for all of us. That's awesome, and we'll make sure we'll have all these links in our show notes and everything as well for everybody. So yeah, I mean, yes, right to the heart of it, right? I mean, how to feel better about work, and we're going to dive in here, and that's definitely one of the things I see all the time too, which is I'm trying to remind folks that you're not in it alone. You're going to need the support, right? And this stuff's hard. It's not easy, and it's that holistic. It's, yeah, your emotions count. This might not be, this is going to be uncomfortable. And how do we get there? But maybe we start with unpacking. I mean, transformation is such a big word. Even as a company, we started with it, then we walked away from it, and then I got really motivated and I'm like, I'm back at it. But you know, what do you think when you hear that word? Like, what is it? What does it really mean? Well, I think it's a great question. And you and I even talked about that early, the summer, where we were wondering, should we be using the language of transformation? And at the time, I think you shared with me that you weren't. And then when we connected in the fall, you said, I think I'm moving back to transformation. And so I think it is a loaded word. And so what I'm saying is, yes, of course, there's things that are transforming really underneath our feet. That's what creates this very strange uncertainty that we find ourselves in. The ground is literally shifting. And that's not actually untrue. We just don't always perceive it. But we're seeing it from economic sectors, from new businesses coming up in the world. Your clients, I'm sure, the mission-driven are seeing it in new ways in terms of how funding happens. And so we're all in the middle of transformation. And so I think the important piece of transformation is that it's an outside in and an inside out phenomenon. And that's different from how we've typically thought about change management in the past. So it's interesting that large organizations started to borrow this language that really came out of, you could call it self-help or new age or even evolved spirituality. But why are we calling it transformation as opposed to growth or evolution or something else? So I think the language is fascinating. And it's important to recognize that when something really does transform, the fundamental elements of it change. The obvious idea is a butterfly changing from a caterpillar. But that's a pretty traumatic event, which is why it has to incubate for a number of days or weeks in a cocoon, so to speak. And so I think that's where we find ourselves. The language of transformation is it's describing a phenomenon that's happening around us. And the more we embrace and say, yeah, these things are happening and what's my role in it within the organization that I find myself in, the better. Now, a lot of companies do use the language of transformation and sometimes it gets translated incorrectly as sort of superficial process work. And so I'm clear to say sometimes if you're using the language, you have to also say, hey, the first step of transformation is more mature processes than we have. Because the process work in and of itself is not always transformative. And that's something that used to drive me crazy until I realized you actually have to have some of those foundational mature processes in order to do deeper transformation work. So I think that's the healthy tension we find ourselves in. Yeah, I like that part on the process. Maybe we could dive in on that a little bit. We like to use, for me, transformation always felt that when I talk about it in a group rather than change, it's like you're taking ownership of it. Like this thing is an activity. It is happening and you've got to be involved. Like, you know, in it. Because changes to your point change happening and we could be overwhelmed by it or we can then try to own it. But you know, in some of our conversations, you've talked about, it's interesting because you've talked about process and kind of what that means and can we get stuck in our old ways of thinking in these processes. Even if you, you know what I mean? And then if we need that little bit of process to start moving it forward, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about kind of the difference between being stuck in a process or making the process the thing and then actually transforming. Well, I think it's a really great way that you've framed that question because you're right that if we just do incremental process improvement, that's not transformative. You're not really foundationally hitting the underlying systems. And the systems perspective is really important and it's something that on the side, I started studying over the last six or seven years because I was recognizing that sometimes organizations, it was more than them being resistant to change is all the systems that we've grown up with, especially in a more mature established company or an organization that's mission-driven is the systems grew up organically and formally around the existing business models. And even if you're a non-for-profit or not-for-profit, you still have a business model. And so everything grew up around that to support that. And so it's flawed thinking, I think. My personal opinion is to say, well, this doesn't work. We have to be more mature. Well, no, it actually probably works just fine to support the existing business model. It doesn't work if we want to do something that's foundationally and fundamentally different. And you have to go into and underneath those unembedded systems, whether they're political or formal like our legal systems and our HR systems and systems are sort of clunky to help catch up. So I think at the individual level, at the team level, and at the leader level, we have to start thinking of, wow, we don't have systems that are ready for this level of change. And so we're going to have to model what the systems will need to look like and sometimes ignore what the systems are doing, kind of pulling us back, sort of crabs in a bucket saying, oh, don't change, don't transform, but we don't really have a choice. It's going to happen with us or to us and we get to choose and I'd rather be part of the the transformation effort. So I think your question around process is great. You will need new processes if you're truly transforming things, but starting out process is often a knee-jerk response that we easily make because we think, okay, now we have to go figure out how this future thing that we haven't built yet, that we haven't fully architected or conceived, now we're going to go figure out first how to process map, how that comes to life. And part of what I say is, oh, take a big step back, think for where you want to go, and then you have to build processes interim processes to get you to that new spot, as well as new processes once whatever you're building comes to life. So if you're building a new digital platform for your advertising and marketing, that means you actually have to shepherd the work and build some processes that help you build that and then create processes to help you run it, future state. The mistake I see a lot of teams, especially in that middle layers, they start at the process work and then they end up in wild goose chases or deep rabbit holes through no fault of their own, but we start mapping things that we don't yet understand. So it's, I mean I think Steve said this to me before where it's, you spend so much time thinking about the process as a process on paper and then you're not really doing it, right? So it's those activities of doing that actually start to make the change, start to help you push through and you know, and tied into that, we had two other, you know, we put together some questions. As always, these are informal but informed discussions, but I'm not even sure which one to go to next. I might just go to the disruption one where I, you know, so Parsons TKO focuses in the mission driven space. I've been working in the DC scene for almost 20 years in the mission driven space and what I've always found interesting is nonprofits will take tech terminology, right? Let's be agile but they don't really apply an agile philosophy and then disruption because it sounds cool like so many people talk about, we got to disrupt and be this disruptor and I heard this fantastic quote, I think the book was called Play Bigger, I was listening to, but they're like disruption is an outcome, it's not the strategy. Like your strategy is something different and then if you disrupted, that was the outcome. You can't plan to disrupt or you're still sticking in the same models and just, so I'm wondering, you know, within the looking at the current processes, developing new processes and thinking about how you get to that next state, where do you see something like disruption in that kind of place or how would, how do people adjust to that and where do you think that balances against the processes that are there versus trying to adjust? Well, I think another great question and I think the whole point of disruption is you have to disrupt yourself and to me if you can start there, because you may or may not disrupt, I've been in many projects for the bulk of my career that said, oh, we're going to do something fundamentally different than what our competition is and that's a great place for a team to start doing visioning work or whatever, but rarely do we build anything that's truly differentiated. So the transformation, my preference is to embed it in every step of the work and so if teams are not used to doing horizontal work where we have marketing and human resources and multiple technology teams where there aren't single technology teams anymore, there's IT and then there's a front-end e-commerce team, there might be an infrastructure team or a networking team and in the olden days, say like even 10 years ago, those teams looked separate from marketing, right, they looked separate from human resources and now everything is having much fuzzier lines and that's creating a lot of challenges for teams, especially because we haven't reorganized, we're trying product models, we're doing some other things, even agile I think is now becoming more like traditional project management and the waterfall than it was ever intended to be because we're trying to formalize some of these things, so the more you can keep yourself nimble, the more you can understand that every piece of this is disrupting and that sometimes there's going to be friction, the better, so I think you're right that the disruption is happening and one of the metaphors I like to coach and train in metaphors and storytelling because I have done too many PowerPoint decks that could literally wallpaper my house probably three times over but the metaphor to use is we're going to see something like a flying car, right, a flying taxi, a flying car in not just in our lifetimes, probably in the next 10 years, right, so this is the level of disruption that's happening around us, whole sectors are being disrupted, whole ways of how money exchanges hands are being disruptive, it's having an impact in the nonprofit where strangely charitable giving has declined even as our markets have been really good, so everything is fundamentally shifting and so I think if we just recognize that you're right disruption isn't a strategy, it's whether it's happening again to us or with us in the organizations we're in and the more nimble you are right now in whatever work you're leading or doing the more prepared you'll be in the five or 10 years from now with whatever's happening next. Some of it's really unpredictable but if you're not at least thinking in the realm of a flying car you might not be doing work in the realm of a flying car but we've got to get your head there so all of us need to be thinking about the fact that these changes are coming and they're coming faster than we've ever seen this type of change before. Yeah it's interesting I get we get questions often now and it's like I can you help me even just understand what the possible is and that's that's been really telling I didn't really have those kind of discussions before but it's been in the last year or so and I like that question because it's I think it is starting people slowly starting to grasp that right like wow this is bigger than I than what I'm seeing in front of me and you had mentioned the integrated workflows of how everything is you know you have these silos but it's all horizontal across it and we see that with technology integrations and then it really manifests itself is that these various pieces of technology that are supposed to integrate but then they're they're budgeted in this department or that department that's right so we've we've come up and we've been calling it the integrator role is what seems to be missing and I had a great question in the summer when I was talking to a group about and they're like well where would that sit like who does it and I was like I honestly don't know I've seen chief marketing officer chief digital officer chief technical officer some group but then as I thought about it over the year it's like there almost has to be some kind of leader or person in the organization that doesn't doesn't have stake in the outcomes for a single department that can then talk to everybody from them and pull those pieces back together which is which is interesting and so and you had talked to me about and I love this you were like growth isn't this growth is the spiral so I'm wondering you're talking about the flying car and if we think in terms of five to ten years out people ask I get that I don't know if you get this I get this question a lot when I'm talking to groups like what's going to be the next thing and the next five years I'm like I don't know like because people talk about AI artificial intelligence and machine learning and I'm like it's here now yeah it's in five years from now it's here you're just not ready to take advantage of it so when you I guess and how do you balance that your long-term goals as an organization with getting into the quarterly momentum right those small bits that are going to take to get to that long place how do how do you think about that balancing the two well I I love that that you use the word integrator and I think that something must be in the ethers or the zeitgeist now because that's a word I've also started to use so I think in at one point we probably called them generalists and then we said well generalists aren't very useful we need specialists but the truth now is that we need people who can see across and who can bring multiple perspectives into the work so what we know for sure and there's data that backs it up is when we have right not just diverse teams and diverse thinking but just when we introduce all of this together into an output the outcomes are so much better and so whether we want to talk about it from a diversity and inclusion perspective that's probably a separate conversation but the more diverse our thinking is in the work that we're leading and the more diverse that we can push into the outcomes where multiple teams have a stake in the plans we're creating in the process work we're doing I've done deep process work with people from it and marketing and the business units and it works it's painful it really is a little painful because we have to get to some common language about what we're creating so I think the integrator point is really a great one and organizations are starting to feel it they are probably in the short one going to put project managers in it and I grew up in the early days as a project manager I taught project management I have deep sympathy and affection for project managers but they're not the integrators and so integration has to have a strategic component and an architecture component and so really goes to what are we building and how do we get there and that's where a great PM can come in so how I balance with the work I do with teams and I think intuitively I did this for a long time and then when I started to overlay coaching into this approach I saw how powerful it really was is take that longer term vision whether it's three years or five years and some people advocate even 10 20 years out that's really tricky space but then bring it back to the particular so I'm a strategist by nature and by training but I take issues sometimes with the idea of oh there's strategy and then there's tactics because sometimes there's actual short term quantum strategy boots on the ground things that are actually going to move that strategy forward and how I do that with the teams I work with is concrete actionable outputs so we focus on deliverables instead of activities what are we going to create together and there's something magical that happens I'm focusing on some building something and so Tony in one of our conversations you shared with me how a client was so grateful because so many things came to life as a result of something that you helped build and I not surprised because when we build things that's how you start to build the dynamic in the teamwork and so the faster I can help a team move to clarity of what is it that we have to create or produce and then who's involved in creating these different things and then what's the accountability to each other to move through that the faster everybody starts to work together now on the converse side when we start to focus on here's the strategy now team go figure out how you're going to work together and we can spend for hours or days or weeks or months we've all been in these meetings where we start to think okay what's our process for communicating with each other what's our process for who's accountable for what and the truth is in those early days of building building something to execute against the strategy we don't know and so we can spend a lot of time going through a racy document where we're talking about who's responsible and who's accountable and who do I consult with and the truth is we don't know we have to start pushing it into outputs the other thing that managing by outputs as opposed to pure siloed account accountability or where we focus on people doing things individually is we start to get clarity and much simpler plans if you have five things that you have to create and then you're working with the team on those five things they all know what they have to create and then you can start to see how fast things come to life and I think it's really tempting sometimes to think that people don't know how to do this we do know how to do it the the teams do know how to do it and our executive leaders do know what how to lead but it's pulling it together in things that are simple and so again you know apologies to people who've worked with me in past lives where I over complicated things but I'm really in the mindset now how do we make things simple and clear so everybody's clear on where they're going and to your point on the short term the best question you can ask a team especially if you have senior leaders on the team is what happens over the next 90 days and often they don't know and I don't know is a fantastic place to start because it starts to invite curiosity okay well now let's build a plan let's shape how we're going to do this let's figure out what where we are today and what do we need to where do we need to be at the end of 90 days and most importantly what will we have created so again that's how I balance that future and current state so that we start to move in the direction of a tier point it's not a straight line it's a curved line but we know we're always on that curve otherwise we it's really easy to quickly get off the curve and go something do something that's not transformative at all I mean your point on the 90 days is so crucial we've been as a company looking at different things too and working with clients like OKRs and really finding ways to put teeth against here's the objectives and how much can you in helping a group understand how much you can fit into 90 days practically right and really and it really shows oh this is going to take time you know the last conversation I was in with the prospective client they were throwing everything out of the table and I was like you guys understand this is three years worth of work because you're looking across the table like your colleagues like they're going to get it done in the next six months and we can help facilitate some of that but this is three years this you can't do it as quick as you think and I'm wondering if you know if in that sense it's like my thought for change or doing things it's always been there's the top down the executives right they're gonna say oh we have one year and we have budget to get it all done and you're on the ground trying to make the change doing it I mean do you have experience with that too of how you you meld this to come together in that middle space to actually make something happen I do and I've spent a lot of time in that space and thinking about that problem and I think that there's a couple of things I want to frame first is the middle layer of companies right those middle managers at big companies larger companies and larger organizations but so I would say VP to a senior manager manager type role and why it's important to classify that is that it's easy to think that we have the executives and then we have the rest and it's not really true we have a middle layer that the function of that middle layer has always been and evolved to support the existing business processes right so if you're if you are a startup you tend to be relatively flat if you're in a turnaround mode you go flat but where we get that middle layer is when things become unwieldy and we have to add some layers in order to shepherd the current state what I think is happening and again it's my own experience because I've witnessed this and I talked to a lot of people doing this type of work is the middle layer is now being asked to do things that are transformative to lead really messy bodies of horizontal work and to string things together and to integrate that's not how those roles grew up so especially if you're talking to somebody who's at a VP or senior director level that role always existed to protect that vertical and now they're being asked to do things that are really horizontal and an organizational level work but we have to push it somewhere and it can't always be led by an executive or you'd have a very top-heavy organization so that's one thing that's happening so how I coach teams is I say we have to do both right bring bring the vision from the smart executive thinkers and there are plenty of them and I push back on people who say our executives don't get it and I push back on executives who say the middle layer doesn't get it the challenge is trickle down transformation doesn't work we just know that this transformation happens at a system level so if you're conceiving the transformation at an executive level and it's not flowing through the rest of the organization in actual work with outputs then you'll stumble in a year or two from now that's assured because it the idea of doing it as an umbrella that just cascades down it things fall apart so if you can have a team of people or multiple teams of people shepherding work from the middle and I say instead of a bottom's up approach it's an it's a middle out where the middle is managing up out and down to the extent that they need to and communicating up is crucial because they have to do something to bridge the executive thinking the strategic thinking and the direction with what's actually happening now let's talk a little bit about what's happening in the middle as well is sometimes what needs to happen is counter-intuitive from that big picture vision we often start with the big stuff and then everybody gets kind of overwhelmed we have massive teams and very little gets through there are a lot of little things that have to happen along the way and this I think was your earlier point is how do you tell an organization and get them in the mindset that this is a three-year journey and it's going to be uncomfortable and it's going to be boring right there's a lot of tedium in some of this work because you have to build some of the things to make sure the new systems and the new infrastructure can grow up organically to support that future state in a year or two three two or three or five years from now yeah i mean i'd love that part we talked about this too the boredom part there's a book i was listening to recently mastery um not the big thick one i can't remember the gentleman's name it's a shorter one but he was focusing on his experiences in aikido and it was i'm just going to practice this punch and i'm on this plateau and this is what i'm going to do for the next year and he's like but it's in doing that that you get to that next level and it's interesting to take that in comparison to the organizations we work with because you know it makes you think of two things one is it's a three-year effort for some type of transformation i hear a lot in the mission driven space around me about change fatigue and then the other thing i always hear is i need a quick win what's my quick win and it's i wonder if you just have any thoughts on those two between it like we have said it's several times in this conversation this is happening though the industries are shifting right there's there's nothing we can do we got to be able to adapt so change is inevitable and and own it or not but change fatigue seems to be a thing people talk about mostly with system switching and then yeah so i don't know if you got opinions on these okay and then how do i get a quick win is the one thing i do to keep the momentum right because this it does get emotional yeah how do you keep yourself engaged yeah i think it's great question right because somehow in it it's a it's a weird situation now where we're not always being told what to do and that is a really important component of this i hear from a lot of people well i need greater world role clarity and i need more direction for my leadership team and trust me when i say if they had it they would give it to you and right i mean that's that's where we're at and so when we talk about change fatigue i think it's one the part of what i do is i had to figure out as a strategist how to go to the level of individuals how do i help individuals who are in that while knowing we're still advancing strategy and there is some making peace with the fact that the change is inevitable and so how can i be a part of it i really do think foundationally that at an individual level we all have to just be somewhat accepting that the change is coming so whether we're fatigued or not and i will say i talked to a lot of really exhausted people is recognizing that it is exhausting and it doesn't always alleviate it but sometimes cognitively i think it does help for us to go oh right so a few deep breaths and to recognize that as fast as everything feels to be moving there's still some weird relativity of time we're on a day-to-day basis it's moving at a very myopically slow speed so go into those moments and recognize that there's change fatigue that seems to be pummeling us and then there's still moments where we can take a step back and and breathe and kind of go okay how can i see this around me so that's one piece now when we're talking about the uh how do you keep momentum in all of this i think it really is that idea of the integrator right so how do you have people who are thinking enough to say where are we going to be in three years and to trust that the work is getting us there because it won't always feel like that we have to keep moving things forward and are we moving forward even if it's tedious even if the output doesn't feel super sexy and this goes back to your point about the quick wins and one of the things i've been on an individual basis when i work with people is i'm very quick to say there really aren't big wins and there really aren't quick wins anymore maybe there weren't 20 30 years ago but there it really doesn't exist now where we have one spectacular big win and it makes a career you're more likely to have a collaborative project that was cumbersome and clunky and messy and you delivered something fantastic that 200 people could put on their resume so part of the making peace with some of this is in the role you're in the wins might not come quickly that's a really tough nut to swallow right just take that in a little bit is there are really aren't quick wins in the role you're currently in the work we're doing today again in big organization small organization not-for-profit mission driven doesn't yet doesn't matter is we are now shepherding work on an individual basis in order to make things better over time and so the work you're doing today is probably going to set you up better for the role one from now so a year from now or two years from now both at an individual level and your organizations so that makes performance reviews really tricky it makes setting goals really tricky and it makes the quick wins really tricky because they really don't exist and so there's something they have to say how do i manage what i'm doing professionally how do i manage that within the context of this work and then to trust that if you're a person i meet plenty of very thoughtful people who are very high integrity who say i think i'm just going to focus on doing this really great work and then telling a really great story so that you can get some traction with that and so if there are failures how do we learn from that if you built something that's not sexy how do you tie it back into an existing p&l and say guess what we're already using these three components of the new technology to support this existing piece of the business that's the quickest route to gain if you know in the traditional change management language champions or sponsors but tie it back to the existing business tie it back to how it benefits somebody who owns a p&l who is thinking oh my gosh i can't manage all this change and the quarterly pressure so what we can do for each other is take some of that pressure off by saying we're going to build some things that will support the future as well as pull the existing business into the future by supporting it now yeah i mean so yes i have so many thoughts after everything you just said right there uh you know i've expressed it to you i've expressed it to other people and it's it's something that has i think has surrounded me for a long time but it only really started dawning on me where it's i think the annual budget cycles that happen at least in the the work i do with mission driven sectors and the annual performance review planning are hindering what i think is the potential for some of the progress that could be made even on an individual level because if i budget this year because i've got the money this year to do everything i possibly can i don't know where it's going to be next year um you still have to do something next year and what if you can't get it all done this year oh well does it not flow over so you know we find road mapping across the years and trying what we try to help groups is like what's your cumulative approach to the work and why do you want to get there and how can you all decide what's a priority and if you know you didn't get to it it's okay because it's still there but i think about this too because you know burnout is real and we see people who take on these change roles uh whether it's default and they meant to or not you know they it's hard i like what you were saying there like they're they're looking for role clarity they're looking for something from the leader and it's hard for a leader to say hey let me really fix this for you uh or give you the really a good clarity today because they can't right to your point but how do we you know how do we manage against that how do we you know for me it's always been what lessons learned can you pull out of this what are you gaining individually from this right because it is messy and it is hard but you're going to learn a lot of things you didn't intend to i think in the old days these to come soft skills now they're calling it emotional intelligence or eq or iq or i don't know what they're saying these days but um i still don't have any thoughts on that like we're and you made the other point too maybe we should talk about this like what have what have you seen that is sure sign for failure in these like how how would these things fail but also this is culture shifting and culture changing at the same time and again back to the tech language i always hear we like to fail fast and failure is acceptable but then i've never seen any of these groups actually admit to a failure publicly or anywhere or even documented to say hey we tried three approaches two didn't work this is why we went with one if in the future you want to look back at our math and see why these two didn't work and you think you can make it work great but this is why we went i i never see this and so i feel like that's almost this other downward pressure on these on staff that are trying to do this work right where it's i don't know how this is going to go i probably am not going to get it right but you want me to deliver this thing that's supposedly perfect and this is a lot of emotional pressure on me so i don't know if you have thoughts on how do you bring failure acceptance in and what are the warning signs well we're going to fail i think that's one of the things we have to accept it we're just going to fail and the question then becomes can you not just learn from the failures but can you almost use the failures as future work so this is a something i've used in the coaching i've done and with the teams i've led to say sometimes what we're doing today does not feel like it's going to move the needle in that quick win but we're we're planting the seeds for future work where we can pick the work back up at a later time and it'll still be relevant and current and that's a really strange muscle to build but super helpful is you're going to fail because there are political wins there are just human flaws and failings and so we're going to bump into that every day and so i think it's whether we want to call it emotional intelligence or not it's these things kind of pummel us and that we're i mean a lot of people are just exhausted because of that so let's acknowledge we're going to fail so let's focus on doing meaningful and actionable future work that we know is needed whether anybody's telling us to do it or not and i don't have to press teams even relatively junior teams i don't have to press them very hard to figure out what would actually move the needle they know and especially if you can get a meeting of the minds where you can get say five or eight people in a room to think about that for 90 minutes with the right questions that group will advance thinking they will shift their baseline up so that curve starts to move in a more upward trajectory even if it's still a loop or a spiral so don't underestimate what you can do with kind of crowdsourcing so one of the things i laugh and i tell people is look back like tom Sawyer was a genius he got a bunch of people to do the work he didn't want to do and so let's go back and borrow from some of that is you can actually bring people together and not a brainstorming session but actually like how are we going to materially move this and take some of the pressure off just those people who are on the hook for it and especially in the middle layer you can get a lot of clarity you can advance a lot of thinking even if it's wrong even if it feels like a failure because what it does is suddenly you've coalesced a lot of thinking and understanding from the middle layer of organizations then you can vet it with your senior level and they will tell you if it's wrong but they can't tell you if your understanding is wrong if you're not at least willing to put something out there if you're not at least willing to guess on strategic direction if you're not at least willing to say i think my role is ambiguous but i'm pretty sure we need to go over here and do these three things and produce something right they'll they'll course correct but right now everybody is so uncertain in the roles they're in and so i think anything you can do to start advancing the thinking and coalescing thinking within the organizations you're in the better um let's talk a little bit about the distractions that you talked about right the things like performance reviews and the budget process and bonus bonuses and things like that these are all necessary and good things and mature organizations healthy mature organizations do these things but they're the last to catch up so when we talk about the foundational systems these systems that dictate budgets and how we spend money the systems that dictate how we're going to evaluate and reward talent which you can also just call people right those are are pretty stable systems and so it's going to take quite a long time for them to catch up fundamentally nothing really has shifted in these spaces for years and years and years even while the internet has is now cycling through but maybe it's fifth generation and we're heading into we're using AI today and we may not even be aware of it it's happening where organizations are shifting from having all of their infrastructure on site to using the cloud these things are happening while these other processes budgets and procurement and HR systems they're staying relatively stable and they might be more efficient but they're not yet disrupted and so i think what we have to do is just look at them for what they are and what i tell people is attach no self-esteem to your performance review because at best it's just a a useful but incomplete process to evaluate and tell you what's going on with the people in the organization at the most kind of cynical approach it's just a way to distribute money on a bell curve right like if you're doing bonuses and so don't attach any self-worth in it just use it take it for what it is and an organization that wasn't doing it would soon be figuring out that they had to do it and so it's going to be imperfect budgets are going to be messy and imperfect performance evaluations and goal-setting are going to be messy and imperfect so don't spend a lot of emotional energy on those things even as you're doing them and doing them responsibly so that's the best way i could say to navigate that is they're not going away and we would need something in their in their place so just take it with kind of a broad perspective oh yeah i have to go do performance reviews and i'm going to spend two hours on it and not get emotionally upset about it i'm just going to do what's good for my team or what's good for me and then keep going and do the meaningful and good work that will actually move things along both individually and at a team level and organization level so how i mean try to spin it positive again i guess but i mean it's messy it's uncomfortable but it could be fun right i mean i think there's there's so much upside to it and i'm curious in your experience have you seen organizations that were on a good path and then just stalled out because they were on that plateau and couldn't they couldn't tell they were making the difference you know or like even the person maybe the people working on it like oh man if you did just stuck with it for like another another year you would have been there there yeah of course i mean you and i both seen this happen right because there's an incubation period that usually is the length of a project where we're building something new then we're incubating it and then there's a reorg and all that learning sort of gets pushed to the wayside and again this is why i'm saying do things that are future proof that somebody could pick up that body of work no matter what happens within the organization so i think it happens a lot because organizations first try to reorganize reorganize people moving people around an organizational chart it's a natural thing to want to do and sometimes it's necessary but a lot of work and learning also gets pushed to the wayside that's probably not going to change but if you do the work in a way that says i don't have to be on this team for two years you do things in a really different asymmetrical way if you know you're going the cycle is there are reorganizations in the in the organization after every the end of every fiscal year then do something where at the end of the fiscal year you know you've actually moved something forward and can hand it over to somebody else or they can go back and look at it so again it's reframing how we think about these things because we're going to keep doing that work now to your point can it be fun it's absolutely fun and this is the push I get from people to say well if there are no quick wins if there are no big wins if it's so hard why do it and my answer is simple because making new things is thrilling and it may not always lead to the perfect performance review or the straight-line curve but you'll know you're onto something when you're part of making things and teams that make things together even if it's there's some friction in there they produce better outcomes right the data shows us that that happens and so I think it's making peace with these things and then saying I'm doing it because the alternative is sitting idle and inertia is way worse than some cognitive disruption or some discomfort so you had a quote about the defriction or your number I thought yeah yeah I mean what yeah so my coaching training was from the Neural Leadership Institute and I was reading one of their blog posts in the last couple of months and this was just fascinating to me because they were talking about the phenomenon of group think and so we all know that inclusion and collaboration are wonderful but they can also produce flawed outcomes or imperfect outcomes because we get everybody thinking together in the same and so the premise of the article was they took a group of people or multiple groups of people went in a survey and introduced quite a bit of friction into that so they made sure that when they were interviewing people that there was a lot of friction among the teams among the siloed thinking and the teams that were having so much friction self-reported that they didn't think that they did very well that their outcomes weren't good and what the the empirical data showed was that most of the time if not all of the time the teams with friction outperform the teams that had strong cohesion but were more inclined to have group think and so this idea that we should all be getting along and that how well how can we build more cohesion it's really more of how do we have a safe spot in order to have that discomfort and that friction because we know from the data that it produces better outcomes this was not encouraging data to a lot of the people that I work with because the moral of the story and the message is the friction is good and it produces far better outcomes and this is also why I think savvy executives don't always intervene to fix things because they know that if they let the teams kind of storm and norm then over time those outcomes will be better and so even the temptation to reorganize is probably there's probably some value just in the fact that you keep introducing the friction that there's some healthy tension that's always there but self-reported the teams felt it was really not a great experience and so I think the more we can just say there's something juicy that happens when we bring people with really strong viewpoints together and then again that role of the integrator can be strategic it can be architectural but it also can be as the coach and that's I think why I am doing what I'm doing is so I can look at that from all these different layers and say okay now how do we help these teams so that they don't feel like they want to go home and just you know crawl into lounge wear and go to bed in the middle of winter how do we help it make it a more interesting and dynamic environment even if it doesn't always feel great I mean I'd love that point because there was you know some work I've done in the past like but I remember talking to it's in a very hierarchical organization and in that whoever was the highest ranked person in the room would tend to just talk and everybody would be quiet and then they might leave later and then they might have an opinion or they might want to do it different but they didn't speak it and then the person was sensitive who had been the leader like oh I wish I'd heard that I said well we have to start creating the environments where we can make that happen where people can feel comfortable in the room to disagree and it was I would always say you know disagreement doesn't equal disrespect like there is a way to do this I almost feel like we have to like relearn the art of debate or something where I think so I I always tell people like what makes you most nervous I'm like I am so nervous when everybody just agrees right out of the box on something because I just I just don't I don't think that's human nature I don't think it's true and I know I'm never the genius in the room right who has it all figured out so it's like I know there's other smart people like why aren't you coming in I mean I love that point I really think that's something to take forward I mean we should just be blasting on a billboard it's like you need the diversity of opinions you need you need disagreements you need you need to be challenged a little bit and then feel good about where you get to right yeah make sure all this yeah and celebrate that so and I want to make sure that we're because when I started this company you know I had to really wrestle with what was I really going to focus on was I going to focus at the organizational level these big messy hairy things or was I going to focus at the level of the work and so for me I know those big hairy messy things are going to be out there and there are very good resources and excellent coaches and consultants who focus in that space but what happens sometimes as we're focusing there we forget about shepherding the work forward that's also going to catch up and so for me I just acknowledge there's going to be a lot of friction in organizations it's part of the deal the organizations are going to have light and dark and they're going to have great strategy and terrible strategy and they're going to have messy emotions and people and it's okay right that's how I make peace with it and with the people I work with is just say you can't fix that if somebody else might be working on it and you might not even know that they're working on it but let's focus at the level that you're at and see what you can do and at the individual level to bring teams closer together and I've done this at relatively junior levels in organizations and they love it because all of a sudden they come back from a meeting with their peers and this is not C-suite executives it's not part of the executive leadership team these are people who truly boost on the ground getting work done and figuring out how to collaborate every day and with a few tools and a few things that orient them to say well why can't you have a better meeting with this group of peers and they go oh I guess I could and then they come back and they say oh my gosh that worked fantastically well so again we have to kind of empower ourselves and model the behavior at whatever level we're at in the organization and waiting for again that top down trickle down transformation you're going to wait a long time and so anything you can do just to say today I'm going to show up a little bit differently and again that's a really different mindset for me because I was always thinking about big picture strategy and could push teams to get there and it's just not super fun to be pushed so how can we make it so it's a more if not enjoyable experience a more growth oriented experience along the way yeah I like that a lot and I never we're gonna probably running up on time it's just for our audience in general we've tried to get these down to questions but it's these conversations are so good I think this is just the format of this long-form conversation because it's too good yeah it's it's interesting too what I have found in my experience at least up until now is maybe as more groups start to grasp with the fact that they're going to have to have these evolutionary changes in transformation but it's it seems I've always been the change agent for who was assigned to was someone who really didn't have authority they didn't have a staff or a team or they were but they're given these mandates right and I like where you had said you focused on the work that's that's where I saw it in my career in the beginning was I would go into these organizations and I'd be the one who did this big website redesign special project manager right and then you have to go and you have to talk about taxonomy or your work structure or why you're doing this with this department and it was someone really wise academic when I was interviewing her or one of these organizations are working to tell me she's like you're not building a website you're shifting the culture of the organization and you're actually changing its perception to the world she's like that's why everybody is upset with you and I was like wow okay like the anthropologist and he then came out and was like let me think about this in a different way but I'm wondering it has that been your experience too and you know what do we do to make sure if you're that person you feel supported for yourself and where to look yeah I think your point is really good and we've talked about this too and I think there is a phenomenon that happens especially because so much of this transformative work spans an entire organization so we tend to invite all the senior stakeholders into the first conversations about the transformative transformation or the transformative work and we push it then into a reverse funnel where we have ten executive leaders and one project manager who's not a peer of those executive leaders so I just call it upside down pyramid and that's a that's not a super organizational structure if you see that structure the work will suffer and so now that person that doesn't let them off the hook because they've been given an assignment and it's their job today and so let's talk practically what that person can do and then we'll go back up so that person again put on that Tom Sawyer hat to say how do I go build a not just a coalition but a team of helpers right a team of people who can help me shape the thinking and maybe I'm not going to get to a completely redesigned website but maybe I can bring it together so that we have a common architecture that we could take to those executive leaders but one person can't do it by themselves and so if you have that kind of reverse pyramid structure what I tell people is go build friendships and partnerships and helpers going list helpers among people in those verticals and then bring them together to actually in 90-minute increments it doesn't actually have to be any longer to say today we're going to decide what this looks like or we're going to frame all the multiple viewpoints that we have so we can share with our executive team so one of the biggest skills I think that individual who kind of is trying to hold all of that together and those are really tough roles I've been in them I know you have how do we move that forward as you start to get good at building narratives and you have to build a narrative that goes up and out and they're not sometimes they're the same but they're not always the same and so this is a skill I think that we have to start thinking of how do you build that skill because the traditional project management of empirically showing the progress against the plan doesn't seem to work anymore there has to be some storytelling that goes with it and so as competent as I know many project managers are and I know some really excellent ones the storytelling becomes really important just to say how do we synthesize or integrate the story to say guess what we have 17 different definitions of this one thing and then you get you wake executives up right then they go oh my gosh how do we fix that how do we help you fix that or we have these competing priorities and if we reorient them we figured out how we can move some things forward right those are the stories you need to be able to start telling so anything you can do to get better at enlisting help in short and framing short increment deliverables to say we're going to go create something and advance the knowledge base and the thinking of the organization and last but definitely not least how to frame back a narrative that helps you to manage the whole thing all right I mean this has been an awesome conversation I can probably keep going for quite a while but we're coming up on an hour so what are any last thoughts that you might want to speak to guys and maybe we can we can do this again or you know I love talking with you Tony so I think one it just keeps the conversation going and know that work is really hard there's a reason why I'm doing what I'm doing is that it just is really hard I hear it from everybody and they're so relieved when we say it and you've talked about this too acknowledge that we're in the middle of a fundamental shift and not only how we work but what work is going to look like the truth is what's shifting under us with technology and with these organizations shifting how their sectors work is we don't know what 10 years from now is even going to look like and so I think we're feeling those effects and the more we're just talking about that and then finding ways to do good work that starts to make people feel a little bit more like oh I can handle this I can manage this even if there's not necessarily a clear road map yeah I love it I mean yeah we say too right we talk to so many clients are like oh we must be the worst I'm like no everyone has these problems like you're not alone it it just appears it's a it's that social media phenomenon everybody's happy everybody's happy and it's like no everyone's everybody's struggling because to your point this is this is an interesting time technology is is everywhere these these roles are changing what should you even study return to the generalist um well this has been fantastic I really appreciate you coming on here with me today and having this conversation um so again carolins layers uh murphy merton murphy merton.com you got it uh look her up on linkedin hit that website and if you really liked what you heard today give us some comments you know we'd love some feedback and see if this is helpful and hopefully we could bring back another conversation about transformation and change again and so thank you so much for your time today thanks tony I really appreciate it