 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. This is Priyanka from Agile India, and we are very excited to bring Alberto Soranzo with us to talk about architecting change. So with that, let's get going. All yours, Alberto. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. It's so weird to not see people, right? But I'm really excited to be here on the virtual stage at Agile India. Just a quick introduction. I'm Alberto Soranzo. I live in London at the moment. I look after customer experience in Vodafone business globally. And, you know, it's wonderful because I get to work with all sorts of people. I was just telling Priyanka about my colleagues there in India that I'm desperate to go and visit. But let's get into the session. I'm going to be absolutely fumbling with the tech for a second in order to share my screen. As I do that, Priyanka would have told you that I'm happy to take questions during the session. If I don't see your question while I'm talking, please don't worry. I will do that as soon as I see it or in the Q&A session. What are we talking about today? I want to talk to you about change. And one of the questions that I would ask if we were in a live audience would be to raise your hands. And so please do so virtually and ask you how many of you are working in a transformation program at the moment? Oh, awesome. People are raising their hands. Amazing. So I see people raising their hands. For everybody else who has not raised their hands, don't worry. It's going to happen to you because that's what we are doing. But before we get into the transformations that we are in right now, I want to talk to you about a really interesting story. Because I think it frames the conversation quite nicely. If you're young or not as old as I am, you might not know what the things you see on the screen are. The things you see on the screen are film canisters from Kodak. Now, Kodak is pretty much nonexistent right now as a company. But you would be amazed to know that they developed the first digital camera in 1975. And that's a long time ago, right? That's almost 50 years ago. And when the engineer, there was this engineer, Steve Sassoon, who very proudly went to his stakeholders and said, here's what I've invented. This is the future. They said, oh, that's cute, but it's never going to stick. And they did that because it was phoneless photography. And their business was not to make cameras. It was to make photographic and digital film. So they were completely unable to see digital photography as a disruptive technology that would continue for decades. The thing is that Kodak not only rejected that first attempt at digital photography. It continued. And to understand how this happened, there was this gentleman that in 1981, he was head of marketing intelligence. And every company has that. We do market research, market scanning. We try to predict the future. So in 1981, Sony introduced a digital camera for the first time. So six years after Kodak had come up with the technology. And so this head of marketing intelligence, his name was Vince Brava, decided to look at the market and figure out whether this was something that was worth revisiting. And I'm sure the diesel sounds familiar, maybe not for Kodak, but for what you're doing in your organizations. So he did quite a bit of research. And the results of the study that he presented produced both bad and good news. So the bad news was that digital photography had the potential to be a technology that would stick around and to replace, it had the potential to replace Kodak's film-based business. But the good news was that it would take some time for that to occur. And that Kodak had roughly about 10 years to prepare. The thing is that during this, you know, that 10 year window of opportunity, Kodak didn't do very much to prepare for the disruption. And in fact, they continued making the mistake. They continued making the mistake. And so when they finally came out with the first Kodak digital camera, it looked a little bit like this. It was the first ever megapixel camera. As you can see on the screen to your left, it had a digital viewfinder. You know, you would have been able to preview your photo. But if you look very closely, there is a film canister on the box. So yes, it was a digital camera. It allowed you to preview the shots, but it still relied on the old technology. So of course, this camera flopped. I remember when they came out. It was 1986. I was a kid. And everybody was very excited. But of course, they didn't stack around. And now if you, you know, if you look around in electronic stores on Amazon, wherever you buy your tech, you will not see a Kodak camera. Now, why did that happen? We can explain why this happened using a mathematical model. And I promise to you, we are not going to be using very many, very many numbers in this presentation. So this is a mathematical model that looks at how we solve problems. So a local, you will see on the screen, local optimum and a global optimum. When we organizationally solve problems, we are generally firmly stuck in the local optimum. So we are looking at a solution that is optimal within all neighboring solutions. I see raised hands, by the way, but I don't see any questions. So I am going to go ahead, but then remember the question. If you have a question, please put it in the chat so I can see it. So as I was saying, the local optimum looks at the best possible solution within all neighboring solutions. This is what Kodak did. Their business was felt. And so they looked at a solution that included film, but looked at the future. This is in contrast to a global optimum, which is the optimal solution among all possible solutions, not just those in a particular neighborhood of values. Now, sounds familiar. Is this what you do in your own organizations? I've seen it happen multiple times. What gets even, what this tells us is that when we think about transformation, we really talk about optimization. So we focus on improving current situations, but we are not looking at what the possibilities are. Vikram, I see your hands up, but I don't see any question in the chat. So bear with me. I'm not ignoring you. So if we set global goals that are based upon where we are starting today, and we're heading in a direction, looking at heading into a direction that optimizes, that improves our current situation, we will likely reach a local optimum, but probably it will not be the optimal strategy because of course, we have competition, some people are faster, we don't know what they're doing. So we need to start looking at what we usually call outside of the box. Now, what we do, though, is because we are a large organization, we need to have some sort of order. We rely on known processes. And as the founder of Netflix said, process brings seductively strong near-term outcomes. Because with process, you can foresee what's going to happen. You can set KPIs. And once you meet them, you are successful. And this is how we function in organization. So we label our efforts, which are really optimization as digital transformation, because we use digital technology to change our business in one way or another. But we are still missing a big part of the whole transformation picture. And that's disruption. This gets even trickier because it's the traditional management techniques that we employ. And I got nothing against MBAs. MBAs are great and management schools are great. But the traditional management techniques don't just fail us in this circumstance. They tend to make things a lot worse. There's a study that showed that about less than 30% of established companies begin to, that begin to falter or fail, ever rebound. That's a 70% failure rate. And the reason for this is that the models that we turn to generally do not work. Because those models do not say that we do not care about our customers. Kodak cared very much about their customers. But as the organizations get larger and more entrenched in their communities, they also become more risk averse. And we become so risk averse where failure is not an option. So we do know that most of what we learn comes from failure. I mean, if you look at the photo on the screen, we've come a long time from that by trial and error. But established organizations have so many responsibility. They have so many stakeholders that they need to respond to and shareholders that they need to respond to that this risk becomes too much to bear and paralyzes us. Now, looking at the organization as I work with and looking around globally, there are three archetypes that are generally followed in these optimization strategies. Now, the first one is what I call Prince Charming or the Nighting, you know, in a shining armor. This is generally someone who comes from the outside. He's seen as the savior as someone who is going to turn our organization around. And generally, this person has a lot of passion, a lot of ideas, a lot of preconceived notions, doesn't know much about the main that they're in. And they come, they make all the change, and then it fails. I don't know if this sounds familiar. That's exactly what happened in the States. When someone who didn't know politics came in to save the country, and, you know, we all know what happened, right? Then when the Nighting shining armor method fails, we turn to innovation or skunkworks. Now, I don't know if you're familiar with, you know, where the term skunkworks and where it came from. It came from, you know, Lockheed Martin during the war. They worked us with creating a bomber plane that that would withstand enemy fire. They threw their best engineers, they threw their best materials and their best tools in a hangar. And they came out with, you know, this plane that was amazing. Now, that's what we do with our innovation factories. And it's not that innovation is bad, innovation is great is what we do, right? The thing is that if you chuck people and toys and money in a corner and you give them beanbag, it is not a scalable model. If they're not immersed in the context of the organization, they can come up with a brilliant idea, but it's not scalable. It's not repeatable. And then there is the third archetype that I see a lot in organization and that's the management consultancy, the external partners. Now, consultants are great. They're really smart. The thing is that they generally come in to do change, to do transformation at people, not with people. So, you know, they're the smart ones. They're the ones that leadership looks at. They come up with these brilliant plans and then they drop the power point and they leave. What happens there is that people are resentful because they're not part of the change. The knowledge of the organization is knowledge of the domain knowledge gets transferred out when the consultants leave and you're left in an unsuitable situation. Why does this happen though? Because we know this. We can see this. Why does this happen? Very quickly, this happens. If you've read, if you have designers friends, if you are designers, of course, if you're coaches, you've heard of Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and he explains why we keep repeating these cycles and these, you know, keep falling into these fallacies. So, this is because the way we think and the way we operate is based on this System 1 and System 2. System 1 or cognitive ease is where we go, say, on autopilot. It's fast, unconscious, automatic. It's the everyday decision. You, if I had to think, I'm in System 1 right now, where I'd like to think that I'm thoughtful and slow and conscious and I'm making complex decisions, the reality is that I'm talking, I'm focusing on the camera, I'm looking at what's on the screen, I'm reading. If I had to be conscious about all those activities, it would be exhausting. I can't think, okay, now I'm going to move my hand here. I'm going to take a breath. I'm going to talk about that word. You know, it's way too much work. So, what we do is, what we do is we go on autopilot and that's also how we make decisions. We, you know, we look at what has worked in the past, what is reliable, what, you know, is an accepted standard and we look at that to make our decision. So, we keep making the same thing. The thing is, we keep going on autopilot because our, as I was saying, our work dynamics are a little skewed, right? So, John McGregor in the 60s had this exercise that I think further compound my theory. He looked at groups of manager, right? And he listening on or went to management meeting to understand how people make decisions. And he came up with two different groups of behaviors and developed these theory X and theory Y. So, the old industrial model and the old mentality is that people are a cost that needs to be monitored and controlled. Work should be highly segmented by expertise. This is where, you know, we go back to decisions that have been previously made, the consultants, et cetera, et cetera, because they're already experts. Technology should be used to control. On the other hand, there are managers that believe that people can be self-motivated, self-controlled, that the more people understand about the system, the better decisions they can make and the better work that they can do, that the conditions can be created for people that to seek that responsibility. And more importantly, that people can enjoy work. Now, if we look at these, you know, system one, system two, autonomous versus intentional, control versus, you know, freedom and autonomy and responsibility, we can start to understand that this model of making decisions is really interesting. You know, there's, we're humans and as such, we're flawed. And, you know, there is this psychologist whose work I really, I really admire, Chris Argyris, he talks about the letter of influence. Keep in mind, we have all these forces at play in our mind. When we're at work, what we do is we starting from the bottom. We look at reality and facts. We select the ones that fit in our mental models. We interpret reality through this selection. Then we form assumption, jump to conclusions, develop beliefs and, you know, and then that's how we act. If you think that people are lazy and stupid and can't think for themselves, that's your assumption. You will construct systems that will actually cause them to act that way. And they, you know, and you're making sure that they will not think for themselves. And, you know, the thing is, we don't work in a factory where that might work. We're knowledge workers. And if things start going wrong, then we have these systems and we're in a lot of trouble. Now, sorry, I went back. Now, we're all familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of need, which is why I left it. But if the need is to, if the top most need is to find satisfaction in what we do and to self actualize, and it's possible for us to enjoy work, then, you know, it is clear that people don't have to hate work, that it can be as natural as rest or play. But only, but we will commit to this kind of thinking only if we can find a way of satisfying our development needs and our, you know, internal personas. And this is even more true because the work that we're knowledge workers and the work that we do is differentiated as trucker would say by a high degree of non routine work in non deterministic environment, non deterministic meaning means that we often don't know the end state of a process at the beginning. So start thinking about this in the context of your day to day work, you've got a roadmap, you know what the end state that the organization wants, but still the work that we do is non deterministic. We're not really sure that that happens. And because not only we are now in this kind of tangle of dynamics of theories of psychological states. This is all made more complex by the fact that we work in complex adaptive systems and complex adaptive systems are self organizing, they change all the time, they're non deterministic because of their own nature. And that just means that we need to be a lot better at considering the human factor and collaborating with people in different way. Now I want to talk about systems for just a second, because when we think about a system we can think about it about a blob as a blob, or we can think about as the union of its parts. And I really, so one of the people that I admire the most in our space is Dr. Russ Aikov. He says that the system is more than some of its parts. It is an indivisible whole. It loses essential properties when it's taken apart. And this is what it's got to say about it. Let's just take a simple example. I read in the New York Times recently that 457 different automobiles are available in the United States. Let's buy one of each and bring them into a large garage. Let's then hire 200 of the best automotive engineers in the world and ask them to determine which car has the best engine. Suppose they come back and say the Rolls-Royce has the best engine. Make a note of it. Which one has the best transmission? We ask them and they go run tests and come back and say the Mercedes does. Which one has the best battery? Come back and say the Buick does. And one by one for every part required for an automobile, they tell us which is the best one available. Now we take that list, give it back to them and say remove those parts from those cars, put them together into the best possible automobile. Because now we'll have an automobile consisting of all the best parts. What do we get? You don't even get an automobile. For the obvious reason that the parts don't fit. The performance of the system depends on how the parts fit. Not how they act taken separately. Right. So he's amazing. I'm sorry. I mean, if you ever want to link to this entire talk, it's absolutely brilliant. But we are working in systems. We are working in complex adaptive system. And yes, they are nondeterministic. And these systems are not just made of processes and products and services. They are systems of people. And I want to look at how organizationally we look at people. So if you work in a large organization, a small organization, as a consultant, it doesn't matter. You will have heard this. People are our most important assets. It all begins with talent. We need to win the war for talent to war. Leadership matters more than the leaders. Okay, then we take our systems of people and we make this beautiful, beautiful you know, the pyramids and schemas and people all fit neatly together in someone's vision. And by the way, Nariam, thank you for making that point because this is exactly what I'm talking about. I hope I didn't butcher your name. So as I was saying, we make these neat representations of, you know, how people fit in the system that we have in our head. The reality though is a little different. And reality looks a little bit like this. I'll give you a second to take this all in. Our ordered, you know, view of the world is then completely messed up by the human connections, by the relationships, by the things we don't see, by the things that change. You know, there's allegiances based on the same football team. There's bribes. There are old scores that needed to be settled. There are relationships, you know, there is just so much that we, you know, that our needs representations are not really doing justice to. This is also made worse by the fact that then we want to measure these people and we want to rank them and we want to invest on people, right, because it's a war for talent. So we look at performance and we look at potential and guess where the investment goes, right? Investment always goes into high performance, high potential. And the people who are in the corner, the one that we see as the outliers, are left out. Now, again, Narayam, I hope I'm not butchering your name, but this is where sports come in. If we only have people that score, who is going to be in the, you know, in the goal? Who's going to pass? If we only focus on those people that we understand to be high potential, high performance, are we really doing justice to all our other colleagues? And are we doing justice on the organization? Are we not missing out potentially on something? Now, what I really like to talk about is learning organizations. And, you know, it's where, you know, you really take the compounding power of systems of people that, you know, fit together in a certain way, that learn, that change, so that they can change, you know, they can change the organization, they can help it evolve. They can help it evolve. You know, co-evolution is a really important concept in psychology. And I do believe that people in organization can co-evolve together. And so for me, the work that we should do as coaches, as designers, as business people is more about changing mindsets than transforming or digitizing processes and products. And this is where, since systems thinking comes into play. And it's a big part of my practice. It's about helping people understand their work in the context of the whole system. You know, personal mastery is all about individual learning, but it's also about organizational learning. It's, and this is where it gets really sad, because if you look at the traditional organization, you know, generally people are over-allocated and we don't make that time. Now, I am really lucky that, you know, in the organization I am currently in, but for business, we do have allocated time for growth, for self-learning, for discovery and experiment. And it's making a world of difference to how we are internally. And this is particularly important because even though we look at organizations just as purely, you know, places where business transactions and operations happen, every organization is, has intentional foundation. It is based on an idea. Someone has had an idea somewhere that we could, you know, that we should be making this or we should be making that. At the moment, I'm reading a book called Shoe Dog by Phil Knight and it's the story of how Nike, this four shoe company, started and it's fascinating. And you know, he had this idea that running shoes, he was around there and I don't want to give away the book if you want to read it, but it's wonderful and every organization is like that. And so I think that the magic spot is where the organizational intent, which, you know, focuses the goal and the group goal and the individual goal intersect. This is where the magic happens and I really like how, you know, everybody loves a good Venn diagram, right? I also really love how organizationally we can look at that in a slightly different way, you know? This is from a book called in everyone culture becoming a deliberately developmental organization or learning organizations. It talks about, you know, this organizational versus group versus self-goal are expressed in, you know, in drivers. The edge to the left of your screen is where we get our challenge, where we can learn, we sponsor the intention to grow and learn and self-improvement. The home is where we get our support and where we build resilience and the groove is where we learn how to learn. But of course, you know, we need to do work. I mean, this is brilliant from a human point of view. We also need to do some work. So I like this equation of talent. Dave Ulrich was an organizational psychologist, so I use this quite a bit. So he talks about competence, doing, you know, doing the work and the ability to do the work as right person, right place, right time, right skills, talks about commitment. So that's important even more, even more so when, you know, the market, the job market is really interesting, right? As employees looking for a job, we always think, well, what do I have to do? What do I give? But it's also important to think about what do I get? What is the organization going to provide for me? And then there's the contribution, the actual work that gives you identity purpose, the work itself, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that if we take everything that I've talked about, we can really think about how we help our organizations evolve by design. Now, who doesn't like a canvas, right? I would ask you or in a room to raise your hand and tell me how, you know, how many canvases do you use? Probably a lot, right? This canvas is a little different. This is a canvas that was created by a good friend of mine, Marco Calzolari. He is an agile coach and in actually started as an agile coach. Now, he's something more coach in Italy. And he developed this canvas to look at the human side of the organizational system. I'm more than happy to share this. It's creative common. And I have his permission to use it. He knows I'm talking about this. So I take his canvas and I map it against psychological forces. So there is the public, you know, there is a public side. So your unique value contribution, what your job title is. There's something about the individual. Remember the equation of talent? What do I give? What do I get? There's an organizational side to the canvas. So what are you going to do for the organization? Purposes, activities, needs. And then there is an element of trust, which I at the very bottom, which I think it's important. It's the foundation of the professional relationship. So when you start looking at this talent canvas, which is a tool that is made to become self-redundant, but it's really interesting to have conversations with your teams or with the people we work with using this type of schematic, you can start mapping against, you know, both the human side, autonomous. So what's in it for me and systemic? How does this relate to the system? And I think you can also use it in a different way, not just looking at the overlap between what can be achieved with autonomy and what can be allowed in the system, but also you can develop a career while matching what you learned. So the hindsight, what you bring to the foresight, what you have to do, and you get some really lovely insights. So if we take the talent canvas, you know, I color coded it for, I color coded it for ease of reading to the talent equation, to the talent canvas, you've got this, you know, you have competence, commitment, contribution, and you can really start planning for a team that brings together all the different elements that, you know, you do need. And I know that this was a whirlwind tour into, you know, into how I think about organization and what we can do collectively to help our organizations transform, to architect that change. I have a bunch of tools that I use with my teams that I'm more than happy to share with you. And, you know, because of the constraints of timing, we don't really, we don't really have the breath to show them here. But if you're interested, more than happy to connect individually and share what I have. In conclusion, though, what are the things that I would like you to take away from this session? One thought that I think is fundamental and was shared by Dana Chisnell who works, you know, in complex organization in the States is that when people don't understand how their organization works, and what I add is when they don't understand how their own work, how their own contribution fits within that work, they will back themselves in a corner, they will check out, and they will not participate in change. So what do we do to avoid that from happening? What I would encourage you to do is this. Keep in mind that everything is connected and that you need to consider the system. If you make a change here, it's going to have an impact there. Think about that beforehand if you can. It's not always possible, but it's helpful. Do not think of innovating in isolation. It's not helpful, it's not scalable, and it's not sustainable in the long term. The people who know the work are the one who know the problems of the work. They're the ones who, you know, the front-end staff, the call center staff that talks to the customer day in and day out are great proxy for that area of opportunity where you can really make a difference and innovate. You can't have a team of all-star. You need to nurture and develop diverse talent. When I, you know, build a team, when I'm lucky enough to be able to build a team, I look for experienced people and I look for, you know, more junior people because what they bring to the table is diverse and helps me be better and learn. It's all about learning. And, you know, on the back of all about learning, you need to foster continuous learning. If we don't continue learning, we die. And, you know, because organizations are made of us. Organizations die as well. And that leads me to the most important thing for me. Work is important, processes are important, products are important, services are important. All of that is important. But the key to change is something else. Humans are the key to change. And with that, thank you so much for having me. I hope you found this presentation helpful. And I, you know, I send you all a virtual hug. That's what we do in Italy, right? Thank you so much. Thanks, Alberta. It was a very interesting talk. Thank you so much. We have a couple of minutes to take any questions if the participants have any. What is the biggest organizational impediment change? Yes, Vikram. One word, fear. Think about it. Larger organizations, we've established processes and practices. People have learned how to be successful in those environments. So they know that if they do X, Y, and Z and reach and achieve those KPIs, they're going to be seen as top talent, top performer, get a bonus, be in line for promotion. The fear of losing all that is the biggest blocker to doing things in a different way. And not everybody is as lucky as I feel personally right now to have, to be working in an environment that encourages the experimentation where failure or not missing a KPI is not seen at the end of the world. It's not going to kill your career. So I think it's fear. Thanks, Alberta. With that, we are out of time. Thank you so much. Thank you, Priyanka. And thank you again, everybody.