 Thank you for the introduction. Mike's working, it looks like. I've actually never taught in this room before. So if you suddenly see me stumbling into tables, it's because I sort of forgot there was a table here and I forgot there was a table here and I got excited. And so please pick me up off the floor if I go all the way down. Usually at this time on a Tuesday night, I'm up in room 325 teaching the MBA leadership and ethics course, but I team teach that course with Lester Levy. So Lester's upstairs doing heavy duty this evening so that I can be here. So thanks to Lester and I'm delighted that you're here. We had quite a bit of interest in the session so it's exciting. I think most people are interested in something about leadership. Most people are interested in something about change. So we're gonna spend a little time talking about those two concepts, putting them together. I'm going to go quite quickly. I have taught an eight-week course four hours a week just on the topic of leading change. So we're gonna try to briefly go over in 35 minutes what I normally do in about 32 hours. So it's gonna be a bit like taking a drink of water out of a fire hose, but at least that will perhaps give you an introduction to a number of ideas and maybe even make you want to come back. So with that said, I want to say just a few things. I want to thank my benefactors first and foremost. You can probably tell from my accent that I ain't from around here. I've been in New Zealand 15 months. I was recruited by the University of Auckland Business School into the Fletcher Building Employee Education Trust Chair in Leadership and I'm delighted to hold both of those affiliations. I'm proud to be associated with the university and proud to be associated with Fletcher Building. This is what we're gonna do today. I'm gonna spend about five minutes with setup. Spend another 30 minutes or so talking to you. I've reluctant to say talking at you, but I have to admit I have quite a bit to cover so I'm probably not gonna take a lot of participation. Stop me if something's really, really not clear. But there may be some time for questions at the end. Then I'm gonna give you about 20 minutes of work to do at your tables. You have a group exercise to do. Then I'm gonna ask the tables to report out and then hopefully in the last couple of minutes we're gonna put a bow on it and say what we think happened over the last 75 minutes. So with that said, how many of you at your tables know everyone at your table? All right, so here's what we're gonna do first. The first change for tonight is I want you to say, going around the table, three statements and you have 33 seconds. Each of you have 33 seconds. So that means the whole table has to run in four minutes and I want you to feel in these blanks. My name is Kevin. I spend the most of my time away from home at the University of Auckland Business School because I am a professor there. And I'm here tonight because a colleague, Vanessa, stopped me in the hallway and said, hey Kevin, would you do a short chart? And I said, sure, because I had no idea what a short chart was. And so suddenly I find myself here. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start at each table with the person who's furthest from me. So like you and you and you and you and then we're gonna go to the left, all right? Three statements, 33 seconds, go. Thank you for that. Was that fun? Good. Now when you get around to actually doing the group work, I hope that part of what you learned during this session will help you leverage the different levels of expertise and experiences and backgrounds and interests here. So there's actually a purpose in that beyond getting you just to begin to talk to each other. 20%, 30%, 40%. If you've read this brochure, can you tell me anything about what those numbers might need or one of those numbers on the slide? 20% succeed. Yeah, we have different estimates of how successful organizational change efforts are. The most pessimistic is that 80% fail and 20% are successful. The most optimistic statistics we have are that 40% are successful and 60% fail. Now a 400% batting average isn't too bad if you're playing baseball, but if you're playing and you're engaging in organizational change, you want some way to tip the odds above thinking that 40% is your best case scenario. And there are a number of processes and procedures out there that will tend to help tip the scales in favor of more successful organizational change. Will organizational change always be more successful? Will it always be successful? Absolutely not. Anytime you engage in a risky endeavor and change is risky, there are going to be failures, there are going to be mistakes, there are going to be trips along the way, but there are some opportunities to change those statistics. Part of the reason that we have so many failed change efforts is just like this slide suggests, because a lot of bodies, a lot of collateral damage gets done along the way. And so one of the things that we want to focus on is what is the people aspect and change and why do people resist change? So in talking about leadership, a noted scholar again named Ralph Staubville wrote 1974, there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are people who have attempted to define the concept. And then Staubville goes on to provide roughly 400 definitions of leadership. Now I was thinking about listing all 400 tonight, but in the interest of time, I thought I'd just give you a few. And it's not discouraging to me that we have so many different definitions of leadership because in part leadership is a big concept. We don't have a unified theory of leadership to what we have are multiple theories that give us different lenses on the leadership challenge. And so that old metaphor, if it's like touching the elephant, if you're touching the tusk, it feels like a spear. If you're touching the ears, it feels like a window shade blowing in the wind. If you get the trunk, it feels like a snake. If you get the tail, it feels like a rope. That's what we get out of these various definitions of leadership. We get a different perspective on this elephant that we call leadership. So here's five definitions. I won't say randomly selected, but I think that there's somewhat representative of definitions we see out there in the leadership arena. The first one is directing and coordinating the work of group members. Well, this is a real structural approach to thinking about what leadership is. I sit and I direct and I coordinate and I move the boxes around on the organizational chart and I look at the processes and that's one way to think about leadership. The second one is an interpersonal relation in which others comply because they want to, not because they have to. So this person is really focusing on the relationship aspect of leadership, more so than the structural aspects of leadership. The third one is the leader's job is to create conditions for the team to be effective. So what this particular author is thinking about is what's the climate? What's the organizational climate for delivering and what do leaders need to do to develop climate? The fourth one says that leadership represents a complex form of problem solving. There's a guy named Keith Grant and Ron Hypitz who write about different types of problems. They talk about sort of technical problems, those where the solution is easily known and then they talk about at the other end of the continuum they talk about what they call wicked problems. And those are the sorts of problems for which there is no clear solution. So typically leadership is dealing with these complex adaptive wicked problems because for the most part, a more managerial, more process approach can deal with the problem solving, more static problem solving. And finally the last one is the process of influencing the organized group towards accomplishing in a keyword, it's goals. So that keyword it sort of ties into the second definition, others comply because they want to, but the fifth definition takes sort of a process approach and the reason that I wanted to share those different definitions with you is I'm not going to say you should adopt this definition as the best definition of leadership. I have my favorite one, but I realize that like any definition of leadership, a single definition is incomplete. So I think it's useful when we're thinking about change to look at these different definitions and say what is the lever for change that I see in that definition? And for me, structure is a lever in change. Relationships are a lever in change. Climate is a lever in change. How we go about problem solving and decision making is a lever for change. And finally, the organizational processes we put in place are levers for change. So again, I'm not discouraged by the fact that we have these multiple definitions of leadership because for me, that means that we have different tools through which to engage in the change. Now I realize you're in an academic place and you're thinking, oh God, he's going to go on and on about the definitions. But I do want to collapse these pretty quickly together. So when we talk about change, here's five, not parallel definitions, to put a fresh covering on. So that's sort of a minor scale of change. You know, sort of lay a cloth, old wine and new bottles sort of thing to go from one phase to another. That's that process sequence approach to change like we saw in one of the leadership definitions. The replacing of one thing for another. Well, now we've upped the ante quite a bit because if we're replacing one thing for another, we have to say to ourselves, what are we giving up in the change process? And that's actually a place where many organizations have a difficult time managing change. And part of that is because they don't sit down and think about what are we going to give up? They sit down and think about what we need to do next and they just add that onto the existing systems. And of course then they wind up with collateral damage because they give people too much stress. The task is ambiguous. There's a number of challenges in that. A fourth thing it says is to reverse a previously held opinion or decision. When we define culture a little bit later in the session, one of the things that we know about organizational culture is it comes from, and I don't know if Gordon is still here, we were talking about British tradition just before the session started, culture or tradition comes from something that worked really, really well in the past. And a consequence, we teach everyone that that's the right way to do things. And so if we look at the fourth definition of change, what we're going in is telling employees is the very way we taught you to do things, we are now asking you to lay those aside, to abandon them, to give them up. Unless again we go back to the notion we're laying on people, laying on people, laying on people. So the question is what are we gonna stop doing in an effort, what are we gonna abandon doing? And when we ask people to abandon their cherished ways of doing things, how are we going to compensate for the fact that there is some loss there? So some people like the distinction between leadership and management. This is sort of an American view of the world. The Brits tend to say, oh, there's no difference in leadership and management. It's all management and leadership is just a different part of management. So I'm gonna take the American view tonight and suggest that this is a slide from a textbook that says that leadership is about driving change. The essential element that separates leadership from management is that leadership is about driving change and management is about controlling and implementing organizational processes. Now which one is therefore more known? Leadership or management? Situation specific. I don't even think of situation specific. I don't think there's any place where one is more important than the other. Because if we think about those tasks, what we've got is we've got somebody driving the change but something's gotta pay for the change. And what pays for the change is delivering on the current, on the present well. So if I go down to one of my favorite distinction, I got these small letters here at the bottom, that leaders drain the swamp and managers fight the alligators. Well draining the swamp seems more noble but of course you get eaten while you're trying to figure out how to drain the swamp if you don't have some one fighting alligators. But to me there's a virtuous cycle in this notion between leadership and management. And a virtuous cycle makes managers no less essential to the organization than leaders. So then why do we make the distinction? I think we make the distinction because leaders are more rare. Because going back to that first notion, if you're going to drive change, you're taking your risk. And part of taking your risk is being willing to fail publicly. Oh, Kevin tried to drive that change and it failed. Whereas a manager can perhaps sit back and say, I did my darnedest to implement that change but she or he just had the wrong idea. So it's a safe spot to focus on implementation. It's a safer spot to focus on control. And if we go back to traditional supply and demand diagrams, my personal philosophy is that's why leaders get paid more than managers get paid. Because they're getting a premium for being willing to fail publicly. So what is change leadership? If I take those slides that I just put together and argue that these five things down the left and the five things, three things down the right, it's about taking structure. It's about taking relationships. It's about taking climate. It's about managing problem solving. And it's about using your influence to reverse previously held assumptions. To help people abandon or lay aside their forward behaviors and feel good about it. And to replace one thing for another. Now some change is not quite as dramatic as this particular diagram. Here we've got a fish leading one whole water for another whole and often it's not quite that dramatic. But there are different aggregations of change and therefore different time periods associated with different change levels. So what we're gonna do here in just a few minutes is spend a little bit of time covering three change models. And then I'm going, I told you I wasn't gonna pick a favorite definition of leadership, right? But I am gonna pick a favorite change model just for purposes of using it this evening. And so change model one is the Oldie but Goldie. There's a guy named Kurt Lewin way back in the 30s. So I don't think anybody here was alive, I forget if it was 1928 or 1938. But it's a pretty old, he was a social psychologist. He gave us the simplest change model. And in many ways all change models have come forward since our different versions of this particular model. And basically Lewin argued that we're frozen in our routines. For example, I'm pretty sure that when you get up in the morning, you always brush one side of your mouth or the other first. I tend to brush the left because I'm right-handed and then I go to the right. I tend to do the top before the bottom. And I bet you don't change those routines very often. Similarly, I suspect that the way you go to your place of employment is quite a bit of a routine and sometimes you get there and you don't even know how you got here. All right, you somehow an autopilot got there because it's such a routine behavior. And so Lewin says that we're like that in organization. We're stuck in routines. And I've got this picture of a belt down here to remind myself to tell a story. I was on a plane to Shanghai one time with a colleague from, I came here from North Carolina. The colleague, we're in the middle of the air, we're somewhere over Amsterdam or Holland or somewhere along those lines. And he puts a magazine in my lap and he says, dude, you need to read this. And I look at the magazine and the article title is 10 fashion faux pas you must not make. Now, this was obviously going to be feedback, right? So I'm reading down the list of 10 fashion faux pas you must not make. It turned out I was making three of them. And the first one I came to and the only one I tried to change actually was that for men, your excess belt leather should hang to the left. Otherwise, it's bad Feng Shui with your zipper. So I reached down on the plane, somebody in the room right now is reaching down and tugging on their belt. And my excess belt leather was hanging to the right. And some people will say to me, how did you get started doing that? I don't know, I had a 50-50 chance. Are you left-handed? No, I'm not left-handed. Anyway, so my excess belt leather was hanging to the right. And I decided this is a simple thing to do. It's not an important thing to do, right? But all things equal if you cannot commit a fashion faux pas, why wouldn't you correct the behavior? So I'm now almost 40 years old and I decide to put my belt on the other way. How long do you think it took me before it was completely natural for me to put my belt on the other way? 29 days. 39 days, that's very specific. 90 days. 28 days. 28 years. Three years. See, I'm an academic, so by definition I'm slow. It took me six months before it was completely natural. Because think about that. Let's say I started putting my belt on when I was four. That was 36 years times 365 days a year times multiple wardrobe changes. I don't know what the number is, but it's a big number of root-nized behavior. And so in the beginning I'd have my belt on, I'd be in the middle of the day, I might go to the men's room and I'd go to undo my belt and I'd go, oh, I've got my belt on the wrong way. And then it got to where I think about it and on the car as I went to work and then it was when I was in the kitchen when I was having my cereal and breakfast. And then it got to where I was conscious when I was taking out a closet, okay, you gotta do it right, you gotta do it right. In fact, very slowly, but until it was completely automatic, it took me six months. And I tell that story because we sometimes expect people to turn on a dime when we launch a change effort. And it just doesn't happen that way. As Lewin would say, it takes a long time to unfreeze people's current behaviors. And so we dig down a little bit deeper into the unfreeze. Then you actually engage in the change process. Once you've got them, he stuck that in my face and said, 10-fashioned faux pas you must not make. That created in me a sense that I wanted to engage in the change. And you're wondering right now, what are the other two-fashioned faux pas? I'll give you one more. The other one was, you should not wear a button down collar with a three-piece suit. Now, I'm asking by an audience that they know why, but I've got a couple of former students here. And if they remember class, they know the answer. The reason you should not do that is it turns out that a button down collar is not a very formal collar and a three-piece suit is quite a formal suit. And so you have incongruity between the formality of your collar and the formality of your suit. The more formal the suit, the more spread your collar should be. And hence, if you think about tuxedos, they tend to have these sort of open and spread. So at the time, three-piece suits weren't totally out of fashion, so I got a couple chances to try that out. And you'll just have to wait for the third one another day. So that's the sort of oldie but goldie. A second one is by a guy named Michael Beard who's at Harvard Business School. And Harvard Business School has been sort of a bastion of change leadership research and so many of our models come out of there. Beard provides an equation. He actually has an eight-step model, a seven-step model of change that doesn't get referred to a lot. A number of people, especially engineers it seems, like this particular equation. And basically, his premise is that you have to induce dissatisfaction in people. Give them a reason to want to change. But you have to give them a model, a vision of the future, for why change is going to make things different. And finally, you need a process. You need to figure out how you're gonna roll out the change initiative, how people are going to get the information, how quickly or slowly they're gonna be brought along, whether you do a corporate model at once or within a particular division. Do you do it with all functions within the organization so you need this process? And basically, Beard says that if you take these three things and you multiply them, if they're greater than the cost of the change, then probably you should engage in the change effort. If they're less than the cost of the change and the cost of things like relationships are destroyed, we had a reorganization here at the university recently and people's job titles and relationships were changed. There's a significant cost to that. The reward structure changed. Who I am, the group I work with and who I work with changes. And to the extent I need to reskill it threatens my confidence. Because remember, I spent a lot of time getting good at this particular thing I do now. Systems theory tells us that every organization is perfectly designed to get the outcome that it's currently getting. So if we're gonna redesign the system, that means people are going to have to be doing things differently. But I mentioned this was multiplication. Why is multiplication important here as opposed to addition or subtraction or division? If anything is zero, it just falls apart. If anything is zero, so if we pay attention to getting people to satisfy and we give them a clear model for the future, but we don't work the process, we're going to fail. So yes, if anything goes to zero, it all goes to zero. Well, I think that that's what leaders do in their head intuitively, but it doesn't wind up, well, it's a model to think about whether the change is worth engaging in and whether you've touched all the pieces. But you're absolutely right. If I had the economists down from the sixth floor, they could put utils on all these things and we could perfectly say what it's going to be, but the OB guy and the organizational behavior guy in me agrees with you that it's not quite quantifiable, but it is a model to think about, you know, do I have a chance of succeeding? And maybe I come to the conclusion that no, I need to spend more time here, or oh my goodness, I haven't spent much time on process because I'm such a hurry. What's the other property of multiplication that's important? So one is if anything's zero, it all goes to zero. What's the other important thing about multiplication? As compared to say addition, it amplifies. One thing amplifies another. And so we can even have some complicating, some compensating balances here that if we do some things really, really well, it can compensate to some extent for not doing other things very well. But we need to think about the whole equation sometimes to go right to your question. Our notions are not totally rational. For example, I walked me down the hallway on Tuesday and my teaching fellow says to me, Kevin, you need a haircut. And I said, really? And he said, yeah, you know, I know you're doing that short, sharp one Thursday night and you need a haircut. So that created some dissatisfaction in me. And this is not a person who normally is assertive. And he's telling me you need a haircut. So I'm thinking about, oh, I'm gonna have 88 people in the room or however many people are here. Jill Nott's Harry's my boss. Maybe I should get a haircut. But I worked through the whole model and it came down to my wife likes my hair this long. And we're going away to the South Island tomorrow for a ski weekend. I'm taking a day of leave on Friday and Monday. And I decided that all the things on the west side of the model didn't matter as much as the cost of the change if my wife didn't like my haircut. So I chickened out and I'm getting my haircut on Tuesday when I get back. A third change. So the first one was unfreeze, change, refreeze. The second one is the equation model process dissatisfaction is a greater than the cost of change. The one we're gonna focus on here tonight is a model by John Carter, also Harvard Business School. It's an oldie but goldie, but I will tell you in my surveys of multiple organizations, they tend to say this, you know, something's not broke, you don't have to fix it, it seems to work quite well. One of the things that I respect about Carter's books is he's written lots of different books and the best way to sell a new book is to say, I was wrong before, let me tell you the new improvement. And Carter always comes back and said, I went out to find that I was wrong and it turns out I wasn't wrong. I've just got new examples for you of why I was right. Now we might see that as arrogant, but it's also because he's getting a lot of feedback from a lot of people that the process seems to work. And so Carter says, well why do we engage and change in the first place? And he argues that fundamental changes in how an organization needs to conduct itself to cope with emerging markets or changing market concepts is why we typically engage and change in organizations. So in universities we have massive online courses coming on the horizon. We have lots of different online education. We have providers relocating from different locations all over the world in a way that we haven't 10 or 15 years ago. So we're experiencing the same disruption as any other industry due to technology and so we have to think about how we need to change to adapt to those particular circumstances. So Carter says the way you engage and change, you'll be able to group this into unfreeze, change and re-freeze. He says there's an eight-step process and he says here's the bad news. If it's large-scale organizational change, your time frame is three to 10 years. And he says usually when I go in with that message, the CEO immediately wants to throw me out of the office and says we don't have three years to change. We're already six years behind. So can you give us the magic bullets that will accelerate the process? And so Carter's next two points are, well no, here's the deal. The biggest area you can make is to skip the step. That's the temptation that many people engage in. And the second biggest area according to Carter is impatience within the step. Now we're talking about large-scale organization change here when we're talking three to 10 years. So if you read like Blue Gerson's book when elephant stands about this changing IVM, we're talking about those sorts of changes when we talk about large-scale change. So we can begin to back the time frame back some, but I provide that statistic to you because my experience is anytime I go into an organization, they always want to know can we do it quicker? Can we do it faster? And they will often confuse activity with effectiveness. I was describing an elaborate, I did a couple of business at the University of Western Australia once upon a time and I had a guy who flew in every other weekend from Singapore for an executive MBA class. And he was talking to me about a VP of HR position. I described this elaborate selection model that said you need to take six months to hire a top executive. And he said, Kevin, the organization doesn't have six months. We've already gone through four VPs of HR in the last two years. And I said, well, why do you think that is? Well, he went on and he said, so it's even more urgent now that we hire a VP of HR. We can't take six months. The organization, these were his words, the organization can't wait. And I said to him, you've already waited two years. Right, for the right person. All you've got is employees who are now hunkering down and assuming that the next person who comes in with the next silver bullet, who did really good job talk and talked about how they're gonna do it quicker than anybody else, they assume they'll be gone in six months, too. So we always wait. It's just whether we wait and how we can talk to ourselves about how we wait. So here's Carter's eight steps. The first thing he says you have to do is to establish a sense of urgency. And according to his research, 50% of firms fail on step one. Don't even get past step one, establishing enough sense of urgency. And there's a couple different reasons for that. One is, I've already mentioned we get in a hurry and sometimes people feel like corporate policy change looks like this. Employees are now required to carry a hoop at all times and to jump through it prior to the completion of any task. Failure to do so will be grounds for dismissal. Because if they don't experience that dissatisfaction, if they don't know through the model for change, if they don't understand the process, then it just feels like another exercise in corporate hoop jumping. This diagram I think is very useful and this helps us think about the sequencing of the change effort in an organization. Now who are the smartest people in any company? Sorry? The operators. I don't know the answer for sure but I would like to think with my rose colored glasses on that often the best and the brightest people rise to the top of the organization. But let's assume they don't for a moment. Let's assume all the levels of the organization are roughly equal in talent. Then we play different roles. And one of top management's roles is to be outward facing, to be scanning the environment, to see what's coming next, to engage with other CEOs, to talk to market leaders, to talk to other businesses. Their job is to be outward facing. So it makes sense that they would see change first and they also have the most power to drive change. They have the most formal power and often the most influence. And so this particular model here is called the Sarah model, shock, anger, rejection, acceptance. It came out of the death literature. But if you go back to our definitions of change, part of change was laying aside or abandoning something. So something's got to die for us to really engage in large scale change. And if you think about that, then it makes sense that people might go through the process at different intervals because the top of the organization is outward facing, they see the change, they think about the change, they begin to implement the change. They're thinking about those processes, they're thinking about what the vision looks like. As you see here, you've got middle management then perhaps informed. And even though some frontline employees are outward facing, their scope of what they see tends to be very narrow. And so they're being integrated into a fairly large scale change ever. And so if you think about what this looks like over time and that we have different sequencing, then what you really have is what I'm labeling here the commitment gap. So if you think about getting out and I just use this screen since I'm close to it, if we assume that everybody goes through this in an equal amount of time, then what you have is by the time top management is said, and I hate that we have to get it into this large scale change. I hate that the markets are changing so maybe they don't hate it, but I realize that it's gonna be traumatic or challenging for the organization. But they're finally accepting it. When you get up to the middle managers, where are they in their emotional cycle? They're in rejection and the frontline employees are what? Mad as hell. Right? But we're all human and when we get clear on something, we usually want everybody else to get clear on it. And we forget that it takes everybody else as long to go through the cycle as it does us. So we often get at this particular thing, lots of turmoil, lots of resistance in the organization because you've got this difference in where people are on the cycle. And I argued just a few minutes ago that maybe the smartest people and the most talented people, some of you may say the most political people, get to the top of organizations. If that's true, then each curve, as I go from left to right, should get wider. It should actually take middle managers longer to get there than top managers. And it should take line workers the longest time to get here. So this is in some ways the most optimistic scenario of what the commitment gap might be. And we often see organizations that people are mad because they go, we're six months behind, we're six years behind, these people need to get on the stick. Well they are willing to get on the stick, they just need as much time as the people above them had to get on the stick. And so if we don't acknowledge that, and Carter would argue that that's one of the reasons it takes three to 10 years, is we need the sequencing, the process for this to roll out. So these are figurines you can buy online for $75. I don't sell them, so I'm not pushing them. This was the shock, anger, rejection, acceptance, and that fifth one, these people added healing, according to them. After you've accepted it, there's actually a healing process your organization gets through. So if you want to sit these on your desk and move them around every day, but I like this as a visual, because if I think about that staging, if I don't wait for everybody to get to the acceptance stage, then I've got different people sitting at their desk feeling different ways about what we're trying to do. And it makes it visually at least appealing to me to know why it might be hard to get there. So I'm trying to talk a little bit, I realize I'm going fast, and I'm trying to talk a bit about leadership, change of some of these models. Oh I'm sorry, I forgot to go back, excuse me, just a minute. So the other steps have changed. The second change is, step is to form a powerful guiding coalition. And the reason that I want to get back to this is this has little to do with the formal hierarchy. Powerful coalition here means who really has influence? Who do people go to as the sense makers for what's going on in the organization? On my hallway, there are maybe six people who have exactly the same job title, but one of them is the ringleader, so to speak. I know if I can influence her opinion, the other five are gonna come along that way. So whether you get there through network analysis, or whether you get there just through casual observation, knowing who those influencers are, that's what Carter's talking about in terms of forming a powerful coalition. If I use Jim Collins's language, it's getting the right people on the bus. It's forming that powerful coalition. And so if we have a 50% failure rate at this first step, either because people feel like it's hoop jumping, or we haven't allowed enough time for the change to roll through, then if we don't form the powerful guiding coalition, we're not managing the conversation. If all we do is look in the organizational chart and break all the VPs in the room, we're not really managing the conversation because we haven't asked ourselves, are the VPs really the ones with the influence? And then it's interesting that the third step is create a vision, right? Because most people think, I gotta get the vision first. Well, you probably need to identify the problem first. But it's that powerful coalition who can help you identify what solution is possible. Because I may get a vision that's not actually implementable. If my wife were here, she would say, yeah, all the time. So it's about getting that powerful coalition. I might have a strong model for what the vision is, but I actually wanna engage that powerful coalition in a conversation about what the vision looks like. Because unless I do that, they're unlikely to use their influence. And sometimes these people are someone you would consider a protagonist. Sometimes you need a union leader at the table when you really don't want a union leader at the table because again, you're trying to manage the meaning and if they're excluded from the conversation, you can be sure they will fight it. The last thing, and I'm gonna not do all eight steps, but is communicate the vision. I've got the magic number seven down here for two reasons. I said the magic number seven. You know what's the magic number seven? There are seven digits in a US phone number. How many are there in an Auckland phone number? Take out that first nine. Seven. Do you know how that is? A guy named Douglas Brake was a social psychologist from the AT&T corporation, did a bunch of studies on what people can remember. And he wrote an article called The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two. Because he found that most people can remember seven if you just five and a few up to nine. And that's why your phone number is seven digits because Douglas Brake said it shouldn't be. And he also discovered that people hold information in packets, typically of three to four digits. And that's why you tend to have that dash in the middle. And then in front of that may be an area code or a city code or a country code. So all that comes from a 1945 article by some guy who was sitting at AT&T when someone said how many numbers should be? So coming back to the magic number seven. Jack Welch does a GED. And I didn't get this directly from him of course. Jack and I are not friends. But I did spend a fair amount of time with a guy named Steve Kerr who ran GED's HR operations and he went ahead of talent management at Goldman Sachs. And Steve said, here's the deal. You need to tell people seven times. Tell people something seven times before they hear it. So usually you say it the first time and they go, oh, and say it the second time and sort of bounces off of them because there's lots of competing messages and organizations. And then about the third or fourth time you say it, they go, hmm, seems like I've heard that before. And the fourth and fifth time they hear it, they say, that keeps coming up. I better pay attention to it. And the sixth or seventh time they hear it, they go, man, this must be real. I keep hearing it everywhere I go. Now, you may have grown up with my mother who said, don't make me tell you again. But it doesn't work that way in corporate communication. We've got to tell people things seven times till they're so sick of hearing it that they believe that that change message is there sick. And the other magic of seven is you probably need seven different ways to communicate the message. Some of it's print, some of it's video, some of it's a simple message like freeze, unfreeze. A simple model for simpler people and by simpler I mean less mature in the organization. So we need probably seven different ways to think about communicating and making sure that everybody hears it seven times. Culture, I'm gonna go really quick here because I wanted to spend most of my time on leading change and I do wanna put you to work soon. Connor says that the more the culture is externally oriented, is non bureaucratic and encourages leadership at all levels, the easier it will be to succeed with the eight step process. So you can gauge your own organization against that criteria perhaps and say, are we externally oriented, are we non bureaucratic? Do we encourage leadership at all levels? And if you say yes, you don't work for a university. I promise. Although we do some things very well. So going back to the notion of culture, I mentioned earlier these definitions kind of hard to see from where you are. But again, culture comes from the fact that we have taught people that this is the right way to do things. When we brought people in the organization, I worked in finance for a utility company one time and I was told we wear white shirts. That was one of the identity things. And you can come in and a light blue shirt, maybe like this gentleman's got on right here and I'd be standing in the elevator and they'd be like, is your wife dressed you this morning? They'd be like, what? I said, well you have on a light blue shirt. Don't you know you're supposed to wear a white shirt? And so I had to decide whether I would conform or not and you can speculate on what I might have done. So when we talk about culture, there's lots of different ways to talk about culture. I'm gonna just grab one particular model. This comes from Cameron and Quinn who've been doing a lot of culture research over the years at the University of Michigan. And they say that, you know, in lots of different models, they all sort of come back to this notion of things that typically we can think about organizations on two dimensions. They're focused on stability and control versus flexibility and discretion. Or they're externally focused or they're internally focused. And from that notion of internal versus external and flexibility versus stability, we can label cultures. Our buzz is a very simple diagram in these ways. A clan like student family, a lot of mentoring, a lot of nurturing, a lot of participation all the way down to a market orientation. And what I can tell you about cultural change is is that moving to an adjacent box is easier than moving to a diagonal box. So for example, I was working with an organization not too long ago and I gave them the survey and said, what is your organization now? And then I had them answer the question, what does your organization want to be? And they were clearly a clan culture and they were clearly getting the messages that they needed to be a market oriented culture. And so the question then became, are you clear about the process to get there? Going back to that model dissatisfaction. And they were not either dissatisfied enough to really be engaged in the change. And they were not clear on the process to get there. So the level of commitment to change was not very high in this particular organization because the process had been mismanaged. So again, moving from clan to an anhycracy or a hierarchy to market is easier than making an L. Finally, and I think about the last place I've got is when we think about levers of change, this too is an oldie-goldie model that seems to work quite well. This is the McKinsey 7S framework. Part of the reason it works well is people find it easier to remember 7S's than lots of different acronyms. But McKinsey talks about strategy, structure, and systems as the hard knowable things in organizations and therefore the easiest to do. Coming up with a strategy intellectually is easier to do than actually developing the staff and the style and the skills and the shared value. So again, they say that the gold circles here, the so-called soft skills are harder and the so-called hard skills are easier when we think about organizational change, but certainly we can think about these as levers of change. This is just a picture of the pattern model which I'm about to hand to you in just a moment. And how am I doing on time? Too bad. So, let me go back, Chris, just a second. I mentioned the seven times for seven audiences, so I hope you'll think about that. And finally, I didn't spend much time talking about this, but when we lay something aside, when we abandon something that's made us successful in the past, I think it's important to pay tribute to that, to go through and recognize that there should be a bit of a mourning process and we should celebrate that this is the thing that got us there. And we should then celebrate that we're smart enough to know it won't keep us there. But that said, I'm done for tonight. I'll say that change is difficult. Well, as the old saying goes, not changing is fatal. So thanks for your time and attention. And if there are any questions, I'll turn it over to you now.