 Okay, welcome to the first live event in SE3x, Supply Chain Dynamics. You guys already know me, I'm Alexis Bateman, I'm the course lead and a research scientist here at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. And we're very fortunate today to have Don Woodlock and I'll introduce him in just a minute but I'll just do a couple course reminders and then we'll get started with our live event. We're really happy you could join today. So just as a quick reminder, week two open today which is on system dynamics and that's actually what we're going to be talking about today so hopefully that fires you up about the topic and how it can be used in your everyday work, maybe not every day in your work and how that can inform very complex situations especially in the supply chains that you're going to be working. So don't forget that grade assignment one will be due from due in one week from today as well as we're now wrapping up the second part of module one complexity. So there's the open response assignment that will be due as well later on. So make sure to check those due dates, get those in and make sure as well to be participating in the discussion forum. These type of topics are the best when you're kind of talking with your peers about these topics and how that you can use them in your everyday work. So today I'm really excited to have Don Woodlock. So as you watch system diet in the week two videos, Chris Caplus has actually based his videos off of videos that Don had taught years ago because they were such great tutorials about systems thinking and system dynamics. So I was really excited to host him. He has a wealth of experience and so just getting to talk to him is a really nice benefit. So he's currently, he's a vice president at Health Share of InterSystem which is a major health information technology company, formerly at GE Healthcare, a vice president is there as well and he has over 30 years of business strategy experience. So definitely excited to get to hear about his experience. He's also an MIT alum. So we're really, really happy to have him. So I'll let him just say hello. I already gave you the background and introduce yourself really briefly and then we'll get started. Great. Hello everyone. It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I'm glad you're going to watch System Dynamics. I think it's a fascinating topic and you can learn about it this week and it certainly changed the way I think about the world and at work and at home. So I'll talk about that a little bit as we go through this half hour. Perfect. Perfect. So in this session I'm going to be asking him some questions that I'm excited to ask. But as you guys are coming up with questions and they can be on System Dynamics, you can be on business strategy, populate them on Slido. So what will happen is or if you see a question on there that you really like just upvote it and that will probably be the one that we asked on because there's most votes on it. And there will also be a couple of polls that I'm going to run as we're discussing. So make sure to submit your answer there so we get a sense of who you are and what your interests are. So now that we know a little bit about Don, I'll just fire up this poll just to kind of see what phase of your career you're at. So answer that when you have a minute. I just as a kind of general question, how have you seen business strategy change over the last 30 years that you've been active in it? Well, I think there's a lot about strategy that's the same. I think it's important in strategy to make choices. And I see a lot of companies and different organizations not do that. They want to be broad and deep. They want to be best at customer satisfaction with the lowest price and the highest value. And they don't really make choices between kind of the different things they need to do. So I think that that's been constant, that you really need to understand your situation, understand your strengths and make specific choices and put your focus there. In terms of the things that have changed, I think it's more of a there's more of an ecosystem strategies now. So before you build a product and differentiate it from somebody else and that was that. But now you might build a platform and your competitors might build products just like your products on your platform. So it's more of a frenemy model in a sense. So there's a lot more platform as a strategy. It'd be like Amazon selling other people's books. I imagine the first conversation they had about that was this. What are you talking about? Why would we sell other people's books? But understanding that an Amazon or Microsoft as an OS or Rubles or Apple Store that a platform is a great strategy, even if your competitors are in there competing against you. So I think there's more complexity there around ecosystems. And I also think there's more multi-sided markets, I would say. Like if you look at Google, I haven't paid Google a dime, I don't think. But they make a lot of revenue. You know, there's the back end of a lot of markets where the money comes in or a company, you might get money from your customers of different sorts in the way they're brought together. So I think the multi-sided market is more complicated. And I think ecosystem and platform as a business is more prominent today than 20 years ago. Sure. Yeah, that's really interesting, definitely. And that leads right in the next question, which is what do you think makes business so complex and why is it so challenging to make systems thinking decisions? Well, I think there's just so many moving parts in business. Sure. And you're constantly balancing multiple stakeholders. If you're a public company, let's say, you have your shareholders. Actually, in private companies, you have your owners. So you have that stakeholder. You have your customers that obviously want a lot from you. And you have your employees, which are critical to delivering that. And so getting the equation, I think they're running in math. Yes, we're talking to the right crowd. These three parts is very complicated to get it right. And there's also the short term versus long term. It is often what, and system dynamics really teases this out. Often what you do in the short term is not what you would, if you just thought about that, is not what you do in the long term if you just thought about that. So somehow balancing short term and long term and understanding things might get worse before they get better, or things that make the short term look better might erode your long term success. So really balancing short, long term, your multiple stakeholders, it's not a easy thing to do. So that's the world of business. It's just complicated. Yeah, and that's right in line with what we've been learning for the last week in supply chains. What makes it so complex? And that's exactly what we're talking about is all the different players, how they're interacting, trying to manage the timeline. So that rolls right into what we'll be talking about with system dynamics. So with our learners, we have about 45% our mid career. So 24% early career, 17% just getting started and about 14% late career. So we kind of have a whole spread here. And so we'll stop. I don't know how would I answer that question. Perhaps late career, I'm two thirds in. This is what I think about it. I did 15 years in one company, 15 years in the next company, and I'm hoping for 15 years in this one. Oh, that's a nice strategy. Yeah. That's wherever that is, mid to late, I don't know. I suppose I should have defined a timeline there, but it's nice to know where it ruins that. So kind of, you sort of alluded to this now, but how can we begin to deal with complexity in business and think more strategically? And so, okay. Well, I think, one is I think you can treat strategy as a process, at least I have. I mean, I think the perhaps most popularly applied strategy is just intuition of leaders shooting from the hip. But you don't have to do it that way. You know, you can walk through a process. I mean, in my case, I do a process every year. We look at the external market. We look at our own strengths and weaknesses. We have a grand debate process where we say, well, there's, I don't know, eight or 10 different areas where we'd go left or go right, which should we do? So we actually make choices on that after some level of debate. And then you sort of lay it out in a business strategy. So you can actually do strategy process. You don't have to do it just from shooting from the hip from your senior leaders kind of thing. So I think that helps the process. And it also helps the process to not think of strategy I think is so grand and so visionary and so mission oriented. If you just think of it as choices, you only have, I don't know, 10 million to invest. Do you want to do this or that? Or you can focus on being the lowest cost provider or the highest value provider, which one? And sometimes a very painful choices, but just do it. Or it gets made for you or you wallow in the middle of some market and don't really succeed on the different mass ends of the market. Yeah, no, that's good to kind of think about it. Strategy is not this mythical thing that, there are a series of choices that then make up it. I think you can treat it as a process, treat it as a bedrock for making decisions and operating every day and just do it. At times I'm pleasant to make choices like this, but if you don't make choices, they're sort of made for you in the day to day. Sure. Operating. If you don't do it with someone else, Will. Right, great, no, that's a nice kind of segue into what we're gonna talk about. So I am going to start another poll. So have you, the poll is, have you ever made a business decision that had major unintended consequences you didn't plan for? So just to see if you guys have some takes on that. So that's yes, no, I'm not sure, or I never make a decision, which is obviously not true for anyone, but just to be funny there. So I guess just to kind of jump in to, when did you get interested in site system dynamics and how did you start using it? I know that in your position, your former position used it more, but just as kind of a background. I have a comment on this question. Okay. Okay, sure. The notion of unintended consequences is a really important part of system dynamics. Okay, yes. And in fact, I came to believe that everything I did had unintended, possible unintended consequences. And I challenged myself to think of those. So if you, I don't know whatever it is, you're sort of investing in product A or you're gonna put a person that has certain weaknesses and a leadership job, then you know you wanna do that for its intended effect. But then you think through, okay, what are the couple unintended consequences that might happen? And then you take action to stamp those out. And so you kind of always have to assume that there will be unintended consequences. And so the best thing to do is just brainstorm what they are and then do something about them. Yeah. So that's the way I look at it. Not that, because unintended consequences in our culture, just the surprises that, oh my God, this happened. When you could probably think of the two or three things that might happen that you didn't intend to. And if you just pre-think those and take action, then you better off. Yeah, no, I think that that's a nice way to think that you can kind of think about that in advance and plan for it. And especially in the supply chain, right? Things occur and then a series of events happen as a result that you may or may not have been planned for. But the longer someone's in their position, they may already kind of have that on, they could probably map that out on what might happen. So good to kind of have a process to think about what might happen in that case. Sure, sure. So, but your question was getting in the system dynamics, I would say, I'm a mathy person. I'm sure we have a lot of mathy people on the listing. If they're with us, they've had to do a fair amount of math. And by that I mean like growing up, you know, when I would get a math test back, I would know exactly why I got a B on it, let's say A minus or whatever. And when I wrote a paper and I got that back and I got a B on it, I would have no idea why this was right or wrong. So I just had this, I like to kind of understand things in a very specific way. Sure. And then when I got into business, I noticed business was more like the English paper. Right, a lot of gray areas. Just a lot of gray area, a lot of who got promoted and not and how do we make our business successful or grow or whatever. And so I wanted to be more mathy about it. And I eventually decided that business was just an optimization equation. Sure. So you want to optimize your, I don't know, long-term profit or your long-term revenue growth or your long-term customer loyalty or, you know, you just wanted to take those parameters of a business and figure out the right combination to optimize them. So that was my thought. Sure. Getting into business as a mathy person. So I really enjoyed the balance scorecard. This was a popular book of whatever, 20 years ago or 25 years ago, something like that. Because it had that notion of customers, employees, shareholders that you need to have a balance of those. And it had this notion of short and long-term or they might have called it leading or lagging indicators from a metrics point of view that you sort of have this balanced view. So I came to think of business as a system of these interconnected parts that did certain things in the short-term, certain things in the long-term. So that was just, that was that. And then somebody told me I should read the book. It was either called Limits to Growth or Beyond the Limits. Yes. Renamed it. But this great system dynamics book around the earth. So I read that and I was like, this is amazing. This tool, you know, that you can really connect all these parts and try and examine different ways that you might scenario plan the future. And so I just got the bug, took MIT classes on it, read all the some of the major books and just got into it. And the way my videos work and sounds like your videos work is I focused on just applying it, you know, the simple models of system dynamics, not the super like expert complicated things, but I thought of it as story arcs of business, you know, the virtuous cycles, the death spirals, the whack-a-mole game, sort of limits to growth concepts, you know, the concepts that we know of in our culture, but we just don't think of in any system dynamics term. So I really enjoyed experimenting with those, putting them to work, understanding the better through modeling them and using them as much as I could at work, but more importantly, I would say it changed the way my brain worked. You know, I just see, I don't see cause and effect the same way. I don't have a simple view of anything. I always think of things kind of feeding back on themselves. I just sort of, you know, the expression change your mind. It really changed my mind. My head got rewired for a few years of really, you know, swimming in that topic. Yeah, yeah, and definitely kind of, I mean, even hearing you talk now, it can tell that you kind of map everything out in sort of the systems way that, you know, you're like, thinking already ahead about the unintended consequences. I'm not sure that that's a common practice, but you're kind of already thinking about the consequences. Well, I used to think of everything as a puzzle. Like when I would read in the paper or see on the news, some cause and effect, like this caused that. I would always try and think of the way the other thing caused the first thing. Sure, okay. Over the long run. Right, right. And so I usually found the feedback loop and I would challenge myself. So unintended consequences is like that, where you want to put in place some decision or something, but you, as a puzzle, you think through what are the two things will go wrong and then you do something about it. So I was always interested in the more complicated story of any kind of simple decision or action. Yeah, no, that's great. It's great to kind of spur the learners as they're getting into this week, how this thinking can kind of help them as they move forward, especially since this course about real world events impacting supply chains, you can kind of, as an event is occurring, think about how that could be impacting the supply chain and how it already is, how it could in the future. So having this bigger thinking. Yeah, I mean, I think the trick is, you know, mainly time horizon, but you're putting in place something to solve whatever problems in front of you, let's say. But you can't stop there and sort of thinking through what's gonna happen. Right. You have to play that forward. Usually this unintended consequences concept or something else that wants to push back on whatever change you did and you sort of think through all the loops and the longer time horizon. And it's not that hard, you know, you just have to put a little time into it. Yeah, yeah, and these students are there. They're taking that time to learn it. So hopefully they get out as much as you did and expand their thinking. So our survey, fortunate to hear that you guys, 55% have said that you've had major unintended consequences you didn't plan for. So now hearing Don talk about it, you possibly can think about those in advance and plan accordingly. I'm impressed with the 23% that said no. So you guys are, maybe you're already thinking about your unintended consequences. 13%, I'm not sure, I believe that. And the 8% that I never make a decision, I... 8%, wow, that can't be true. I'm not sure, but you know, I think that you're suddenly making decisions all the time, whether you know it or not. So then you talk about, well, I wanted to talk a little bit about different story arcs of business and what you think are the key ones and how that kind of plays out. Well, I think you start with a very simple loops. The virtuous cycle, I think, which I don't know if people call it that much, but you often hear this company's on a roll or this product is really catching steam or expressions like that. And that's an important part of business, especially when you want something new is that you get yourself on a roll. You drive that reinforcing positive cycle. And one of the key things that I really appreciated going through system dynamics was this word-of-mouth concept because that's the main way, or one of the main ways you can get things to feed on itself. So you get a couple of customers, if they're happy, they're gonna tell more people, people are gonna, there's gonna be more demand for your product, you'll have more customers and you kind of, and you wanna feed it. So early on in the business, I really appreciated the importance of reference sites, storytelling, webinars, proof points, making sure people are telling your story. You know, the other classic, or another classic one having to do a supply chain is kind of economies of scale. You get out there with a certain price or you're destined to lose money or whatever, but then you get some volume and that volume allows you to get better prices from your suppliers or better production process or whatever, and then you could lower your price and then you get more volume. And then that helps with that economy of scale. And so whenever you're getting something going, you know, this reinforcing positive loop is important. And it's really the same loop in sort of in reverse in a vicious, you know, death spiral. And I would watch out for this, especially in teams and the same thing kind of company or product confidence that word of mouth can drive you down or team morale. You know, if the team is feeling bad and somebody quits and then you have, you know, the rest of the people have to pick up the slack and then more people quit and you can, these are dangerous things to stop. So whenever I see anything like a vicious cycle going, even if it's slow, like we're on a slow death spiral for whatever reason, you wanna figure out how you can stop it. Like what are the, you know, what are the links in the chain, you know, stop any bad word of mouth, let's say, or don't give the team more work. And if somebody leaves, it was a 10 per steam, now it's a nine per steam, organize the work so nine people can do it happily, you know, or whatever. You gotta stop those links. So, but the main one I dealt with in my career was this concept of S shaped growth. So it was always in companies trying to like keep up sustained growth over decades in a sense. And so the importance of S shaped growth is getting the best going, which is kind of the word of mouth at that part, but then not allowing whatever limit to growth there might be, might be markets at duration or you're sort of creating your own limit by focusing on only one segment and not opening up new segments or things like that. So I was constantly, you know, trying strategies to not have the, I mean, you'll have an S, but kind of start more S's with new products and try and, you know, remove the limit or things like that. But essentially system dynamics at a simple level is these story arcs, the death spirals, the S shaped growth. I studied this, the whack-a-mole story where like a management team, you know, they're having a problem with, I don't know, pricing. So they go over there and focus on that then they're in problem quality, they're in problem with innovation and they're constantly like shifting around. And it's not the greatest way to run an organization. Yes, right. But that's the way I materialize system dynamics is really explaining these very popular story arcs of business, digesting them and, you know, reinforcing the good ones and stopping the bad ones. Right, right now that's a great overview of that. And I, for those of you guys that aren't familiar with whack-a-mole, a lot of, it's the game where you're trying to keep dealing with, putting out each fire, you know, whacking them all down, which is actually a game. It's a carnival game. A bowl is like this little gopher, little creature that you're whacking with. You're trying to get it all the time. It's not a real gopher, no gopher's record. So I'll fire up the next poll just to kind of get a sense. So when you guys make a complex decision, how do you first try to understand what will be the impact of that decision? So options are, talk to key stakeholders, using system dynamics, if you're already well ahead of the curve, process mapping, thinking about it a lot, talk to your boss about it, run a lot of analytics, all of you above, 90 above, and then you can pick multiple options. So I'll fire that up. So if you guys could let us know how you're thinking about it. Also, we're gonna have, I'm gonna be wrapping up my questions in a few minutes. So if you have questions for Don, you'd like to be asked, pop them in the question on Slido. And also if you see one you really like, make sure to upvote, because that's the ones that we'll ask first, the ones that are being upvoted. So the last couple of questions. So one would be- I have some advice on decisions. Oh, please, we would love- So I think the, and this is related to system dynamics or at least understanding the complexity. I think in decision making, it's important to focus on divergence for a while. So let's say you're leading a team through a decision, that you don't try, and you have a certain thing in mind, that you don't try and enforce that and get convergence right away. So the idea is to diverge, have some level of debate and then converge. And I think the divergence is a very important process to understand the complexity and even ferret out some of these unintended consequences that might happen. And I was actually inspired on this point by Alfred P. Sloan. So running GM was some major decision that needed to be made. And he brought it to his senior management team. He says, are we all in agreement as to what to do? And everybody said, yes. And he said, therefore, we're not gonna make the decision now. I wanna see some emerging opinions. I wanna see some debates. We're gonna hash this thing out and then we'll decide. And so he really felt uncomfortable deciding something without divergence, in a sense. So that's a good way to do it. And then just to finish on the unintended consequence, perhaps sometimes you need to make a decision that not everybody agrees with. And the way I've done that, at least as you have to do it, so you can't, can't, it's not easy. For those of those that say they can never have to make a decision, so. Drive consensus all the time, sometimes. But what I've done is I say, okay, we're gonna decide a, tell me to the people that weren't a fan of that decision, tell me what unintended consequences we need to manage for. Or what are the risks that we should be watching for? Because we're gonna do this. And you didn't wanna do it because of these two reasons. So let's manage those two reasons, in a sense. So that's a way that it really fared out this complexity. And the system dynamics thing would be to model it out and do a little bit more complicated thing, but at least if you focus on divergence, you've got the whole complex picture in your head. And then you can better both make the decision and then execute your way through the complexities and make it happen. Sure, yeah, no, I really like that thought about. And Alfred Sloan, we have a Sloan School of Management here, so that's what he was referring. So it's here at MIT, but I like that kind of story as well as the thinking about that by having divergence and decision making, you kind of get all those perspectives instead of the immediate. Yeah, and I think people like convergence because it's better in their daily lives, you're not arguing with people and stuff like that. But the reality is for some decisions, and this is all in good faith, you're just trying to do good things for your organization. But in some decisions, it's better to have some argument so you can see the whole picture first. Yeah, absolutely, you can kind of get that, feel it out. So the last couple of questions, so just we talked about creating these system dynamics models and I know it not as much now, but in your former work, how did you put those models to use in your... So the model that I used the most was a model around R&D spending. Okay. So I ran, here's about $800 million business at this time. We had about 100 million we spend at R&D. And imagine like six or seven teams begging me for their unfair slice of the $100 million. Of course. So how do you choose, okay? So a lot of organizations do like R&D as a percent of sales. Okay, okay. The big business gets more R&D, the little business gets a little R&D. Sure. That's an easy thing to do. But when you think about it, sometimes the bigger businesses are slowing, and the smaller businesses are growing. Yeah. So then you could say, well, let's put money on the smaller businesses, maybe we'll do R&D by some factor of the growth rate. Okay? So you can model it that way. And some of these are self fulfilling prophecies also. So let's say you don't invest in a business because it's not doing well. You might perpetuate that. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's certainly not gonna do well if you don't invest in it that much. So I ended up modeling like all the different ways I could think of to invest R&D. And I eventually found that investing R&D is a percentage of future market size. Okay. Ended up being the best. Wow. Because you were not taking into account necessarily your business performance because you could basically make it a self fulfilling prophecy like I talked about earlier. But you looked at the market. And then the future market size took into account both size and growth rate. Okay. Because those are both important factors because it takes a while to develop products. So you kind of are targeting the future. So I actually, so that's the way we did it. Yeah. With some exceptions, but generally speaking, we would look at the different markets. Everybody was in, how big their markets were, how big they're going to be in a few years and allocated revenue that way. And when we veered from that metric, we had to explain it to ourselves in a sense that, oh, this particular area is super hot or there's no competitors in there. Or there's different ways you might deviate from that. But that was the main thing. Right. I guess the second use was really helping my leaders think through complexity. Right. I guess teaching it or sharing it. In fact, the funny story of my video, so I recorded that for the first video because I did a management call with my managers and some weren't able to be there. And I did 10 minutes assist dynamic. So I decided to record it and our company didn't have a video thing. So I put it on YouTube. So I expected, I had like 50 managers or 60 or and I expected like 40 views. Right. And I ended up getting like thousands and tens of thousands of views. Right. And so I said, well, I guess other people are into the topic. So I carried that forward. That's awesome. That's it. I mean, obviously we found it too. Oh yeah, that's good. They're flattered. Years later. So they're very good. Just to, actually now you kind of answer the question I was gonna say, but communicating your learnings from the system dynamics to your team. How, like, I mean, you kind of give them a tutorial but how have they kind of taken that? Have you seen anyone kind of start to think in that way? As a result? Yes, definitely, definitely. I certainly, you know, like with any group there's certain people that really took to it. And certain people that I'm sure had helped them. I mean, I think the key about system dynamics is we see it in these story arcs. People know the, you know, they could see companies that kind of sow the seeds of their own failure by short-term action. You can see this, you just, and everybody sees it. You just don't know how to think about it or talk about it or whatever. So I like to pick on those things and just explain them in system dynamics terms whenever I get a chance. So that's, but I think the main, the other thing that I like to do, which I don't reference system dynamics when they do this is I like to blame myself or my organization for everything. So this notion of cause and effect, you just sort of drop the simple notion of cause and effect once you get in the system, dynamics, because everything feeds back on it. And so I've changed, I don't blame other groups for anything. You know, there's a lot of finger pointing in companies like a classic case that we always had is our product team would be late on something. And so we would miss our revenue number. And the sales team would blame the product team for being late. And that's true to some extent, but it's also true that when we miss our numbers, we would stop hiring developers and then that would make us more late. And so it was just the simple like, their fault for my situation isn't actually true because when you really think through the systems, they're always feedback on themselves. And so when I am in situations where somebody's trying to blame another team or blame the customer for not doing the right thing with you offer them or whatever, I always think that, well, what do we contribute to that? Did we explain it well enough to the customer or is this inherently difficult? Or, you know, and you just, is when you start to look at yourself as a cause, I think you become a better problem solver. It's not to feel bad about yourself or blah blah, but if you blame somebody else, there's nothing you could do to solve the problem. If you're in a problem situation and if it's somebody else's fault, what are you gonna do other than complain of the water cooler? And that's gonna do nothing. So if you wanna be a problem solver, you gotta think of the things that you caused in the system. And you can affect it. And you can affect it and solve those problems. And I found that that attitude, at least, helped me be a really good problem solver because I took action. This is just saying I'm a victim of somebody else. Sure, no, I love that philosophy. I think that's so right in terms of supply chain. There's always like, this team was late and so many interacting components that I'm sure a lot of finger pointing to instead. So it seems like, why is it late? Is there something that you could have done or is there some systemic thing that causes them to be in the situation? Like also it's similar to the blame thing. I also adopted this attitude that everybody is rational from where they sit. Sure. You know? And you certainly get into a, a lot of people get in a spunk where these people are irrational, they're incompetent, they're something, I don't know why they do that, blah, blah. And with maybe a few exceptions, everybody is really, I think, everybody's rational from their content. So the goals they've been given or the tools that they, or the way they think about the world or whatever. And if you make that assumption, then you're intellectually challenged to figure out, so why is that rational? When you think somebody's irrational, I say, well, I'm wrong. I'm thinking that, why would they do that? I wanna figure out why they would do that. Not just say, why do they do that? That's crazy. So you sort of adopt this attitude that, okay, I'm rational, what is their content? What is the system that they're operating that makes that natural and a good idea from where they sit? And if I want that to change, I gotta go at that context, what are the goals, what are the whatever, that make that rational. Right, right, and that makes so much sense and I think adopting that very practical advice could really help a lot of our learners every day. No, that's, thank you so much for that. So just to wrap up this poll, the way that our students are making complex decisions, how do you map it out is the primary 58% and talk to key stakeholders. So that absolutely makes sense. I'm really happy with the 25% using system dynamics. So that's, that's what we said. I mean, we taught, we're teaching this week, so I'm happy to hear that. 52% in process mapping. 37% think about it a lot and then 37% talk to your boss about it. 33% run a lot of analytics. I thought that would be higher. And then 25% all of the above and none of the above. So that's great, I'm glad everyone's doing something. So I'm gonna ask one final question and we have a lot of questions coming in. So I just, since you brought it up, how does AI or machine learning affect any of this? So, I think, first of all, I love machine learning. Maybe we'll bring you back for machine learning. I'll be happy to. When I get time, I'll do some, actually I have one video posted on machine learning, but I know there are a lot. But I think it's, I think it's, I mean, it's been around for a long time, but there's enough recent breakthroughs in making it very, it's in making it very practical. But I think it's a tremendously, I mean, it's over-height and all that good stuff, but so many of our systems have been automated and digitized, like I think of healthcare. Healthcare used to be very paper-based, fax machines and stuff like that. And now people have electronic medical records. There's a lot of data in there. And this is one of the ways you could put it to use. Which is, what is the connection between what's going on with the patient and let's say their chance of getting a disease or coming into the emergency department in the next year or things like that. And so machine learning is a fabulous way to sort of look at data and form that cause and effect. But it's, it's simple. It's simple in that way. It's one cause to effect at the moment, you know. And system dynamics is like the notion of the feedback loop and having this play out over multiple years. And so it's almost different domains. System dynamics is more the shape of things to come, the story arcs, you know, not the particulars, but more the situations you get yourself in. And machine learning I think is, you know, really grounding down on that cause and effect link in a very sophisticated way. And that's part of system dynamics, is understanding the little links between cause and effect. And one of the nice things about machine learning is a lot of these algorithms you can, you can do what's called feature importance. So you may chunk in like a lot, you know, a thousand pieces of data on a patient and then determine that they're likely to come into the ED in the next 12 months, okay? Then you can also say of those thousand features, which ones are most important in making that link? Sure. And, you know, when you do this in practice in real domains, some things come up that you didn't suspect, you know? And in medicine and health, you know, a lot of non-health factors come in, like your zip code or your socioeconomic status or, you know, just strange, I shouldn't say strange, but things that are outside of what you were thinking about. Sure. You know? Absolutely. And so those, and those are true connections. And there are things that you can do about those once you know them. So there's a lot to our feature in machine learning, but I do think that feature importance and connection is it will help us all become better problem solvers because we'll have a better sense of what's driving certain actions. So you see it really could be complimentary to sort of the systems thinking informing some of that cause effect at scale. So that's great. And I think I would guess machine learning will get better at the time dimension. Sure, yes. In a sense. Okay. Even in the models like we do, you know, if you're trying to understand what is driving a patient to get diabetes, let's say, you have to look at the medical record before they got diabetes because you can't use the things that happen afterward, you know, in the model. So system dynamics is really about the dynamics over time. And machine learning at the moment is, you know, the simple cause and effect. But I think that I think I'm sure we'll be able to combine these disciplines better in years to come. Yeah, absolutely. And for those of you guys that haven't taken ESSC 4x has a segment on machine learning. So maybe we'll see Don again down the road. But thanks for that insight. So now I'm gonna start pulling some questions. So throw your questions up there. If you haven't already. So this is a really nice question from Fritz. How do you handle or prevent bias from influencing your decisions? I think the biggest thing that you can do, I guess two things. One is to realize the bias that you have. Okay. So I run a global business. But I live in the US, let's say. So just because of proximity and because of my growing up, I'm gonna have more knowledge of the US market and maybe even more loyalty to it in a sense. You know, I've met people. I know our customers personally more than my customers in Japan, let's say. So I have this, they're contacting me more. I, you know, there's a reinforcing loop, so to speak that reinforces my knowledge and affection and understanding of the US market. So that's a bias that can be a problem running a global business. So that's an example bias. So another one is there's often a bias for big customers versus small customers. The customer that pays you a million dollars a year versus the million customers that pay you $1. Sure, of course. You know, you're gonna visit the million dollar customer. You're not gonna visit the $1 customer, let's say. So one is to recognize your bias and two is to do something about it. So you need to be conscious of how you allocate your time, let's say. So if the $1, this extreme example, but if the $1 customers are more important, then you may want to hold back on your visits to the million dollar customers. Well, let somebody else do it. You know, if it's important part of business to butter them up, so to speak. But make sure you're holding those focus groups with the $1 customers, let's say. Make sure you're getting the market data on that segment. So once you understand your bias, then you can take very specific actions against it. The other thing I would say is to, I never make decisions by myself. So make decisions as a team using data and make sure that team and that data is appropriately well-rounded, okay? So, you know, back on the global thing, we have a process where all of our US leaders do it too, but all of our non-US leaders present what they're seeing in their markets, what they'd like the headquarters team to work on, things like that. So you have to have those processes to sort of counteract the natural biases that you have. So data's good, engagement's good, and knowing your bias and doing something about it. Right, that's great. And that's a lot of kind of already, what we've talked about before, that pre-thinking about that can solve half the battle, so. I mean, you can't avoid it. Sure, of course. You know, because you've grown up somewhere, or you live somewhere, or you have a background, and those things are good to bring to the table, you know, that's why careers progress in a sense, but they're also a big source of bias that you need to manage. Yeah, it makes sense. So I don't know if you're a liberty to say this or not, but Marvin from Columbia asked, Mr. Woodlock, which has been the hardest decision you've ever had to make as a manager? I would say it's people decisions, really. People decisions are probably the most important decisions that you make. Sure, yeah. You know, who would have put in a particular job, sometimes people don't work out, and so you have to take action to sort of get them somewhere else. And those have been the worst. I mean, especially on the negative side when something is not working out, because often it's not their fault, you know, it's just a situation. You shouldn't have put them in the job, or like I say, I like to blame myself for everything, but you know, there's situations like that, that are the cause of that working out, but it doesn't mean that you can sustain it. So I certainly think people decisions have been the hardest. Sure, no, that makes sense. And I actually have a question from Cyril that kind of jumps right on that, which is, how do you ensure that your team stays united in times of difficulty? Sure, that's an excellent question, and that's very important. I think the most important thing is really having a common mission that everybody kind of understands. You know, the little parable on this is this person walks up to, there's two people laying bricks and goes up to one and says, what are you doing? And the guy says, I'm laying bricks, I put the brick in here, I put the mortar, blah, blah, blah. And then he goes up to the second person and says, what are you doing? He says, I'm building a temple. You know, and they're both sort of right, but the second one had this larger view of how the work at hand fit into the larger mission. So the more you can really make sure that everybody knows what you're actually after, you know, customer success or making healthcare better or making company grow or helping a developing market or who knows, having that be what's top of mind. Sure, in essence, like a North Star kind of thing here. Yeah, basically, basically. And, you know, it's easy in the heat of the battle to talk about all the tactical, you know, topics of Thursday and Friday and Monday and Tuesday, but there's no way that that's your job. You know, the job is usually to do something as a team that's more important than any of you and keeping that on the forefront. And it doesn't have to be like, you know, super inspirational solving or a piece, but take the time to make sure that the team that you're leading has the view of what you're all trying to accomplish together. Sure, no, that's great. Absolutely kind of re-visiting that purpose to keep in the fall. So Amiya has a nice question. How can we objectively eliminate or account for company politics in decision-making? Oh, I hate company politics. I do think that it's important that you succeed in a sense. So part of decision-making is execution of the decision. You know, you don't want to have the right decision that doesn't work out because it fails in the execution. So, you know, you don't want to have the right decision that doesn't work out because it fails in the execution. And that's where company politics come into play, is they can, they can screw up any good idea, you know, when it gets out there in the execution phase. So a lot of times what I think about is in the decision-making process, I think through the successful execution or the challenges with execution. The simplest thing you can do is to have the people involved in the execution or in the politics that you think might undermine what you're about to do involved in the decision. Sure, okay. And a lot of times you don't do that because it creates more conflict and it's gonna be harder for you to do your job and it'll just easier if you and your, you know, two key people just lock the door and decide something. But you're gonna fail in execution. So it's better to have the 25 people or 12 people or whatever involved in the decision. So that you can execute. And the downside of them being involved is that it's gonna be harder to reach consensus. But on the other hand, it'll be easier to execute. So I always side with more people involved. I have, because of this, I think I've evolved to have good facilitation skills. Sure. And so, so those will build up over time if you do this. Mm-hmm. And then I decide decisions like I talked about, which is that you're gonna have people disagree, get them to vocalize, say, we're gonna decide, we're gonna go with A, we're gonna go with this decision. Tell me what we have to watch out for. Mm-hmm, right. And they can state their piece after the decision's made. This is sort of all in the same session, if you think about this. We're making this decision. I've heard everybody, I know we don't agree, but we're gonna decide A. And then in that same session, tell me you four that disagreed, what should we watch out for? And then you get that they state their final piece, in a sense. They realized that this is black and white, we have made this decision. And then you have to follow through. You have to watch the things that they say. Sure. And I think enough of that, you can minimize politics. But I do dislike company politics. It's very hard to, it's very, you're in a company with the minimum politics. Right, if you can, but no. It's just, I'm not sure any company's free of it, but that's a good strategy to think about and be more inclusive in decision making. Sure, sure, sure. So this tongue, this was upvoted quite a few times. So regarding sustainability. So we, this course regard is, has a sustainable supply chain module, but it's sustainability in business as well. And I think this is, sustainability could also be corollary to things that could be expensive or difficult to engage people. And so he's asking, how can you encourage different stakeholders to engage in it, even though it's, you know, sometimes more expensive, more time consuming. So if you could think about it in that way. I'm not positive with the answers, but I'm fine. Sure, yes. I know that's not necessarily your expertise. Sustainability to me is a problem in the long run, not the short run. Sure. So often an unsustainable action is fine in the short run, nobody notices. And so the key, the key is to get folks to understand the long run, I would say. So you're not gonna win a sustainability argument, perhaps just in the short run. Sure. So if you have a way to articulate the long run negative implications of doing an unsustainable decision, let's say, then you can engage everybody and saying, oh, we really don't want to, you know, shoot ourselves in the foot or whatever good analogy might be, you know, in order to have the short term action. And, you know, I learned a lot of this from system dynamics, just seeing good short term things, having bad long-term consequences. Sure, yeah, yeah. And I think the letting people play it out in their mind or helping people do that is the best way to do it. And I think that, I think another approach, which does not work as being self-righteous, so to speak, you know, we have to do sustainability because it's the right thing to do. And I have nothing more to say on it. Right, right. And so you have to, if somebody has a profit motive, let's say, or somebody has, I don't know, some other motive, then you can, if you include the long run, you can state your case under their term. Sure, absolutely. You know what I mean? And I think that's more important than trying to get them to agree with a self-righteous position. Absolutely. So that would be my advice. I don't know if that always works, but that's really the sustainability problem is a long run, a long run view. And if you can get people on that long run view, even on their terms, whether it be profit or some other thing like that, then that'll help. Now I totally, I think, think about that longer term and how it can kind of align with what they're achieving as opposed to sort of these, you know, yeah, I think the line's exactly what I've experienced in my work as well. So I know we're running shortly. So a lot of questions we'll have probably one or two more questions and then we'll wrap it up. So serial hasn't, I think that actually ties to this a little bit, but how do you ensure company values are respected in difficult times where the easiest decision will deviate from them? Yeah, sure. I think it's important to talk about your company values. Sure, yes. I think that's the main thing. I think some companies put them on coffee cups and then never talk about them. And that's just not gonna work. So I do think as a leader at least, leader roles, you need to take the time to stick them into your town halls and your presentations and the way you communicate to kind of reinforce and in clever ways, you can't read them aloud or post them around the floor or things like. You have to think of new and clever ways to sort of take one of the values, let's say your company is for values and kind of talk about it. And I do think that a lot of leaders shy away from that. I don't know, they don't wanna try and be inspirational or try, they just wanna do their thing that their team does. But I think people really enjoy being part of a larger mission and really kind of are aligned with the values of the company. Right, absolutely. So that doesn't solve every problem because the short term pressure can be very strong. And I noticed this in a public company. I would now work in a private company which is really lovely in this respect. Sure, yeah. But in a public company, there are a lot of short term pressures that cause aberrations and what you would do if you didn't have that pressure in terms of long run success of the business. And the more thoughtful you can be, understanding that the long term is paid for by the short term in a sense, so they're not really unrelated. But the more thoughtful you can be about the balance and that we're making this decision now and it has this long term downside or this decision could have this downside, but we need to do one, we take two steps forward with this and let's take one step back and fund this one thing or something kind of balance out things that you're doing because nobody wants to screw up the long term. Of course. I mean, I should say nobody but most people are sitting in a job that they wanna be in for three to five years or whatever and they really wanna sow the seeds of their own failure in the short term. So the more you can help everybody think through the three to five year horizon or whatever based on this decision now, the better off the balance will be. Right, that's great, that's great to think about it. So I'll ask one more question. Rich says, you mentioned earlier the concept of identifying business parameters and developing an optimization for them. Can you share an example from your experience? Yeah, so the, just to repeat myself. So the best example I had was the R&D. Sure, yeah, no, and that was a great example too. So basically the output was the long term revenue Sure, yeah. Essentially, and then the one input was different R&D policies. The big business gets more, give everybody the same amount, base it on growth rate. So I tried like all kinds of different ways to do that to optimize long term revenue. And so there's a very simple one. I really wanted to do the whole balance scorecard someday, which is the different levers around customer sat, different levers around employee satisfaction and how that affected your financials. And because businesses is a virtuous cycle if done right because you do good things for customers, they pay you. Them paying you allows you to employ people and grow and invest in them. And as you invest in people, they get smarter, more competent, stick around longer, tenure is good, things like that. And that allows you to build better products and deliver better customer service. Then those customers pay you even more or you get price premiums. So you get more revenue, which allows you to afford more growth and investment employees. And so these three stakeholders can feed off each other in a very positive way. And I really wanted to model the whole balance for one business, but I never got around to it. But I've often taken things like the R&D, just take our revenue or take growth of customers or take something like that and just look at different policies. Like another, another.