 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are coming to you live from Atlanta, Georgia, the show floor of Citrix Synergy 2019. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Simon Bray, principal at head leadership and culture at Vega Factor. Simon, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, great to be here. So I was doing some stalking of you online as I do for every guest. Thank you. Yep, and I read you're a culture agent based in New York City. Yes. And then you come on set and I'm like, you're not originally from New York City. That is correct. You're transplant and you hail from Brooklyn. Yes, I do. Which is where my mom, Kathy Dally, is from. Very nice, very nice. She would love you automatically because you live in Brooklyn. I consider myself to be a New Yorker. I moved to New York in early 2006. So 14 years and I think I can make that claim although I'm originally from London, so. I would say so. Your accent is still pretty identifiable. I try to keep the accent. I'm mistaken for a Texas accent, so that's. Texas? Yeah. I get that a lot. I bet, yeah. Well, regardless of that, you're a culture agent. Yes. What is that? Can we talk about cultural transformation and corporate cultures and how employee experience is essential, but culture agent, I just thought that was very interesting. Yes. So my job is to help organizations create great cultures. And essentially our theory, Vega fact, is that to create a great culture, first of all you need to make sure that you build an adaptive organization. So one that is able to change, is able to flex, is able to innovate. So that's kind of part one. So my role is really to help organizations become more adaptive. The way that I do that is by trying to create an operating model in an organization that is highly motivating. And we've developed a way of measuring motivation, we call it TOMO, where essentially you look at trying to create a system which drives up the play, purpose and potential that individuals feel. Players enjoying the work, purposes when people feel like they're making a difference and potentials when people feel like they're developing and growing and minimizing the emotional pressure, economic pressure and inertia people feel. So we're trying to design an operating model that drives that up in order to help people become more adaptive. And so my work is to work with leaders and organizations all over the place to help them apply the science of that approach to become more adaptive. That's awesome. So I've heard of FOMO, fear of missing out, which I imagine everybody that's not here at Citrix Energy has FOMO, I know Jomo, I don't have that right now going on. TOMO. Yes. Total motivation. Total motivation. Yeah, so we were asking ourselves the question, how do you get people to turn up and do their best work? How do you get people to be motivated not just to do what it says on their job description but to actually lean into their role, to be constantly thinking about how to improve it, about how to innovate, about how to problem solve, about how to collaborate when times are tough. And really what it boiled down to is a really simple insight which is why we work determines how well we work. And so we started looking at the psychology behind motivation and that's where we developed this framework we call TOMO or Total Motivation, which is where we're looking at trying to get people to turn up and be excited for themselves versus doing things because they're being pressured to do it by external forces. So a lot of great conversation on stage this morning talking about employee experience, employees not getting disenfranchised or feeling unmotivated about their jobs. What are some of the largest factors you see? Did what Citrix shared this morning correlate with what you were seeing when you were talking to clients? 100%, yeah, I think what was interesting this morning was the focus on not just the technology but the people side of things and making sure that there's a close partnership between people and technology and really seeing that through the lens of the overall employee experience. The way that we see the employee experience is everything that affects somebody's motivation in an organization is part of the employee experience. And so everything from the way that you frame up your purpose and identity as an organization to the way that you organize yourselves and design roles and teams to the way that you work together as a team to the way that you set up governance, planning, the talent and performance systems. All of these things can be designed poorly and therefore create disengagement and lack of motivation. They can also be designed really well to drive that play purpose and potential that I talked about earlier on. And as I said before, our work is all about helping organizations design the system within which people work to maximize TOMO. And that's our answer to some of the issues that were raised this morning about employees being disengaged. Our view is that that's just not good enough. You need to make sure that you're really focusing on how to make sure that people turn up and do their best work. And then the technology side of it is making sure that they're equipped with the tools of course that they need to do that. So where do you start when organizations come to you in the Vega factor and say, hey guys, whether it's a younger organization that I would think on one hand might have an advantage being younger, maybe less kind of cultural biases built in versus an organization that might be a competitor with Citrix who's been around for decades and has a very probably, I don't want to say static culture, but probably a lot of cultural elements really locked in. What's the starting point for that fresher organization versus a legacy organization? Are there any overlaps with where you guys recommend? All right, this is where we've got to go. I think the same overall framework applies but just in a slightly different way. So the way we start our conversations often is by defining performance as being having two parts. The first part of performance is tactical performance which is all about strategy, planning and execution and doing that as efficiently as possible. So tactical performance is really important. And then there's also the adaptive performance. Adaptive performance is how effectively can you diverge from the plan, reacting to context changes, innovating, problem solving, solving issues. And those two types of performance are both important but they're opposing. So if you have too much tactical performance you end up being very rigid and it kills your ability to be adaptive. If you have too much adaptive performance you end up reinventing things all of the time and having no tactical performance and being a bit chaotic. I share that because when we look at two different types of company, call it a legacy organization and a high growth startup we often find that the high growth startups have too much adaptive performance and that eats their ability to be tactical performance. People go crazy because they're reinventing themselves all the time and they haven't got the processes and systems so a lot of time with those organizations all about getting clear on some of the basics. What are the guardrails within which we operate? What is our purpose and identity? How do we want to organize? So that's all about helping a highly adaptive organization improve their tactical performance. Then the other side of it is a legacy organization. You know, think of any big mega organization where actually as they've grown they've shifted from being really adaptive into being really tactical. They put in place processes and policies and structures to help them manage their scale. The issue is that in doing that they can often lose their ability to be adaptive by becoming bureaucratic. So with those organizations a lot of our work is how can you, without losing that tactical performance create the space and autonomy for teams to be able to be adaptive at the same time? So that's kind of where we come. Same framework but actually a start point that's really quite different. So let's talk about scale. Small organization startups, I can see how that approach can be very deliberate. You can spend a percentage of your time building culture. Let's talk about the big battleships when you're going into a large organization. How does a large organization where it's very difficult to impact change and culture change, how do large organizations tackle this challenge? It's a great question and you're right. It is much harder to work within a big organization to effect change. I think the way that we would typically approach it is first of all, not to try to change a big organization at the same time. You know, it's hard to change the behavior of thousands of people quickly. And so what we try to do is to start by taking a small part of the organization to actually show using that organization what good looks like and then build from that. So show the rest of the organization how this can work, how you can manage both tactical and adaptive performance, how you can create a high-tomo way of working. And then we find that people gradually follow on from there. What's really important about that is one, you're not trying to boil the ocean. But secondly, you're showing people what good looks like and you're giving them the opportunity to opt in. And I found that when people opt in to change and they start pulling for it, that's a much better way to effect change versus operating a situation where change is something that's done to people, where people are told what to do. It's being pushed on that rate. Naturally, you're going to get resistance there. Yeah, for sure. Some of the stats that we heard this morning, and Keith and I are both living this, I think I heard, maybe it was then the last week, that by 2020, which is literally around the corner, that 50% of the workforce is going to be remote. And I think they were saying this morning that in the next few years there's going to be 65 billion connected devices each person having about eight different connected devices. And you're Keith and I are here with our different devices. Where do you see the necessity of delivering mobile experiences, but also for cultural impact for businesses, small or large, to enable workers to be remote and give them access rather than forcing that they sit on a train for an hour or in the car and be in the office. Where is that conversation in the Vega platform? Yeah, it's an interesting one. So one of the things that we spend a lot of time doing is working with individual teams to help them operate more as a team. One of the things I found quite surprising in my work with different types of organizations is that often teams are connected by a common manager, but essentially are a collection of individual contributors who aren't actually working on shared issues. So one of the first things that we like to do is to help teams reorient themselves around a shared purpose. And set themselves challenges for things that they want to solve together to improve their collective performance. So that's a foundational piece. Once we've done that, then the next question becomes to answer your question, how do you get teams to problem solve together effectively? And there's two different times when teams problem solve. One is what we would call synchronously. Synchronously is where teams need to get together physically and actually brainstorm and kick around a problem. And there is a time and a place to do that. And that's why it's still important to have get-togethers and to create that human connection. But actually more and more, we find that teams need to also be able to solve problems in parallel, asynchronously. And I think that's where technology comes in. Technology allows teams to work together on problems, but not all be in the same place at the same time to be able to do that in parallel and whenever they want to. And it's when you get that asynchronous problem solving and synchronous problem solving that you can get teams to generally work together. And that way we find people perform at a much higher level than if they're essentially just focusing on the job that they have. So obviously you work across industries, groups and type of functions. Can you share with us some correlation between Tomo, the horizon, kind of this employee experience measure and performance, like what are some of the key indicators that culture is improving performance? It's a great question as well. So one of the things that we spend a lot of time doing in our early research is trying to quantify culture. Because you know, most of us would agree that culture is important, but it becomes something that can easily get shunted down the list or seen as a nice to have all stuff, especially if times are tough. So we spend a lot of time trying to measure culture and then to be able to show a correlation between that measure and the performance of a business. So the first thing that we did is say, well, how do you measure culture? And our way of measuring culture is the degree to which people are motivated. So this comes back to Tomo. The way that we calculate Tomo is by adding up the play purpose and potential that somebody feels and subtracting the emotional pressure, economic pressure and inertia they feel. And these are weighted according to their proximity to the work. And they end up giving us a nice, neat score between minus 100 and positive 100, like net promoter score. And we get that number by asking them six multiple choice questions. So it's two or three minutes. That gives us an individual score, but also of course we can measure that organizationally. We then looked at the correlation between that score and the performances of business across a range of different industries. And we show a straight line correlation between Tomo and business performance. So as an example, we looked at the airline industry and we looked at the Tomo of most of the US airlines. And we found that the highest Tomo airline, can you guess what the highest Tomo airline is? JetBlue, Southwest. Southwest, JetBlue is second. So we found that when you walk on a Southwest or a JetBlue aeroplane, you feel great. It feels different because the employees, the flight crew turn out in a different way. That's because their Tomo is higher. And as a result, the performance of Southwest, particularly around elements like customer experience, customer satisfaction is significantly higher than the rest. The lowest Tomo airline in our data set is United. Now- I was going to guess that. Yeah, now if you think of Tomo, low Tomo tends to be when people either have low play purpose and potential. They're not enjoying their job. They don't feel like they're making a difference or they're not learning. Or the system they're in is very high pressured. High emotional pressure, economic pressure. That creates a lower business performance. And it can also have negative effects from a behavioral point of view. So as an example, if you saw the story a couple of years ago where United had a big scandal where somebody was pulled, manhandled off one of their planes, that's a predictable effect of low Tomo. Our data, our research was done two years before that happened. And we would have been able to predict that United would have issues based upon their low Tomo score. To try to explain, and I wasn't there, of course, but to try to explain what happened through the lens of Tomo, if you create a very high pressure system where the ground staff are being essentially measured on their ability to get the plane to take off on time, when a passenger sits and refuses to move because of the pressure the ground crew are under, they forget what the right thing to do is because of their low Tomo and pressure, they ended up manhandling the passenger off. United lost a billion dollars in their share price. And that's a predictable, what we call a Cobra effect, which is where people kind of feel like they have to cheat or shortcut the system that we would predict the result of low Tomo. So we're almost out of time here, but I'm so curious, what the incentives are for United Airlines to really look at that kind of experience that goes viral on social media. And these things happen, I don't want to say all the time, but that was not an isolated incident. Absolutely not. So for a company like that that's making money hand over fist, flights are always sold out, they're not hurting for business. What incentivizes a business like that to flip that Tomo scale? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think it's really difficult to make any kind of change happen when you're doing okay, first of all, and that's difficult. But the reality is, is that if you had measured the Tomo of United and there are many other examples, I'm not just trying to pick on them, you would have been able to guess that this would happen. And so our advice to organizations is regardless of how successful you are, regardless of how well your business results are in the short term, you need to be thinking long-term about culture. You need to be thinking about what is the operating system that you're putting your employees into and getting ahead of what could be consequences that happen down the stream as a result of well-intended moves that you make now to improve your tactical performance. Awesome, Simon, this has been so interesting. I learned a new acronym, Tomo. I want to have Tomo every day and I'm going to really work on that. Being on theCUBE, it's not hard to achieve that, Simon. We, Keith, I so appreciate you coming by and sharing what you guys are doing at Vega and really, really interesting. Tomo. Thank you very much, thanks guys. Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live on the show floor of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Thanks for watching.