 Hello and welcome to today's Business Skills Webcast, the Change Intelligent Leader. My name is Sarah Gonzalez and I'm from Redback Conferencing. Now most of us know that around 70% of change projects fail to realise the intended business outcomes that we originally had in mind. On top of this, poor execution of any change management plan that we put in place can always leave our teams frustrated and disengaged. Today we're here with Hugh Thomas from Blue Seed Consulting. He's here to enlighten us all on how we can become the Change Intelligent Leader. And I'm excited for one because I feel like change management is something that everyone talks about but very few do, right? So welcome. Thanks Sarah. Great to be here. Good to be here. So technology is moving fast. We hear the word digitisation, sorry, I'd get that one out, can be quite tricky. And all of us know that we're living in the age of this entrepreneur. So how does this impact or intensify a competition, especially when it does come to disrupting incumbents and also impact change management for us? Yeah, well there are lots and lots of different forces for change within organisations. And I guess all of those forces are underpinned by technology and digitisation. Those things are really driving many different aspects of the organisational landscape or the industry landscape globally. And some of those things are impacting competitors, so how organisations need to keep up or beat competitors or be ready for the next competitor. They impact customers, so customers to preferences and so forth. Employees as well have a different experience and have different expectations of organisations. And the government as well, we're seeing changes in how governments are impacting organisations as well. So all of those four key things are impacting how organisations manage their businesses and change their businesses. And all of those aspects are really impacted by digital and technology. So some of the examples of that are with competitors, it's really the age of the entrepreneur and the start-up. You would know this if you've been reading any sort of business publication these days. Silicon Valley is really a hub for entrepreneurs and some of the world's largest organisations aren't very old, they're less than 10 years old. And it's easier than ever to start a business and to disrupt an incumbent large organisation. So it's also customers are becoming faster and more agile in the way that they go to market. So if you're a large organisation, chances are you're a competitor down the road is trying to get faster, the new product out quicker than you put in new technology which is going to free up their people's time, things like that. So all organisations are facing that pressure to be faster and to keep up with those new entrants into the market. Customers as well have very different expectations to what they did five or ten years ago. They expect things to be cheap or free and fast and easy, more so than ever. And have a very low tolerance for otherwise when they get bad service. It's easy to get on the social media and rant about it and you're impacting potentially hundreds or thousands of people when you do that. It's also easy to switch providers. So people can open a bank account in a couple of minutes and switch all their banking over to that reasonably easy, much easier than they used to be able to. So changing customer preferences means organisations need to continually change the way they serve customers and have better standards. Employees as well are experiencing really a greater value of purpose in their work. They know they can switch jobs quite easily. They've got more competitors coming in who are trying to attract that talent whether it's providing a ping pong table or places to sleep during the day. The value proposition is competitive as well for customers. So the older organisations need to really reinvent themselves and become that cool, funky place to work. And that whole culture, and we spoke about this two weeks ago, finally enough, the whole culture aspect can actually plane to brand for many organisations. So it's almost like these three prongs or we've got it right there. They all go into organisation change, don't they? Whereas ten years ago we might not have thought that. That's right and all of them interact with each other as you said. So customers are also attracted to businesses which have that great culture because if they see that in the branding, they see that in the frontline employees who are really happy in their jobs. So customers will be attracted to them as well. And as well the government, as you see a lot of people are dissatisfied with the government. Whether that's because politicians are doing a worse job or we just have more information and we know about all the problems more so. And people have a greater voice on social media so you hear more about the issues and the problems with government. Whatever the case, there's also a faster turnover of leaders so there's more uncertainty. Certainly in the last ten years or so we've had many different leaders of the country, different leaders of major parties. And different balances of power in the houses as well with the Senate. Smaller independence and so forth having a lot of say that can hold up policy and hold up legislation. And that just creates a bit of unpredictability. Things like changes to super impact a lot of investment and fund managers. The recent bank levy that was introduced, banks didn't see that coming. They're going to have to adapt to that and either work out how it affects their customers, their shareholders or employees. So there's a lot of volatility. So the key term which underpins all this that we refer to and is often referred to as VUCA, a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. That sounds really like end of the world. Sounds a bit scary. It can be a bit scary but what we believe, I mean at Belucey what we believe is we accept that and we just work out what do we as individuals need to do to cope with that. To not freak out, to not stress and accept that it is really uncertain and just adapt to that. So you've obviously seen a lot of changes and we just spoke about, you know, the past 10 years how a lot of this is now disrupting businesses and impacting people every single day. In your opinion, how are organisations responding to this change? Are we doing it well? Could it be doing it better or what's the actual current situation? Yeah, there's a lots of different things obviously that make up an organisation so there's different levers that you can pull. One example is people and culture. What we're seeing in organisations is trying to get people more comfortable with that change, as I said, and adopting more agile mindsets. So where, you know, they're ready for change at any moment. They're constantly adapting, constantly shifting directions. Also adopting design thinking. So design thinking is a huge phenomenon at the moment within organisations. Trying to get people to think more about what's the experience our employees are going through and our customers and stakeholders and designing changes around those people. So they're really getting real-time feedback from them and they can quickly course correct to continually meet people's changing needs. And as well as I said, you know, we touched on cultures of organisations. Large organisations need to continually reinvent and evaluate and change their employee value proposition so they continually attract and retain talent. And all these factors, people and culture, they're so powerful within organisations and it's often said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. That's how powerful it is. So it doesn't matter what you're trying to do. If the culture doesn't get on board, then you won't achieve it. But it is hard to influence and it takes time and it's incremental and leaders play such a big part in it. And this can be quite difficult within, like you mentioned before, start-up organisations and they come out with this mindset and they've got this culture, they've got the ping-pong table, they've got the right people and they know who they want to hire. But it is what we're talking about today for organisations that are quite set in their ways. How difficult is that? Do you think they really struggle with it or are we getting better at it? They do struggle. I think it takes time, but they need to look at the whole organisation as a system. But you can't just change the culture probably without changing some systems and processes and the model of how everyone works together. So that's really the key, I think. When you're going to implement change, you need to think about how it impacts all the other parts of the system. Do you think, traditionally, and I might be going ahead a little bit here, when it does come to change management, we tend to operate in silos and we don't really think of this, so it's very me, me, me in my department. We can do, yeah. And we have to respect that to an extent because each department, each team may be impacted in different ways. You could implement a new operating model and it could be 50 teams impacted. They could for different reasons. So they need to understand, OK, well, how does this affect us? How does it affect me, my team, what they're going to do each day? And that's what we try and help organisations do is teach those leaders, the middle managers and the frontline employees how to actually work out what it means for them and what they're going to do differently. OK, so back to this then. So the operating model efficiency, what's that all about? So an operating model refers to lots of different parts of an organisation and how they work together. It can be the org structure, but it's also how all the different parts connect. And what was working and what got you to where you are today isn't necessarily what's going to get you to tomorrow. When there's changes in perhaps the geographic market where you were getting revenue from, maybe different today than it was yesterday. And you may have new technology which can enable you to work more efficiently. You might be able to outsource things. Every Sunday night when I'm ironing my shirts for the week I sometimes think, oh, maybe I should outsource this to the dry cleaner and just get that done. But I think about it, OK, it might save me half an hour of time, but what am I going to do with that half an hour? Is it going to be valuable for me to do that? Or am I just going to sit there and watch TV and maybe I should just be ironing my shirts and save the money. So you have to constantly evaluate what's best for you right now. And if you make that change, how does it impact other aspects of your organisation? I really find technology interesting here because I think you're going to talk a bit about that, but I find speaking to people and even own experience has a lot of people think that technology is going to make their life a lot easier, but sometimes it's not always the case, is it? No. And it can be for various reasons. A lot of the time within organisations that I'm working with, I've helped many organisations implement new technology into their organisation and usually there's a collective sigh. When you say we're implementing a new system, but I think there's two different ways to see change. One is that it's a process and the other is that it's an outcome. And often we don't like the change process, for example. If I said to you, hey, Sarah, tomorrow you're going to have to move house. You might scratch your head and go, what? Do I have to do that? I have to go and look for a house. But if I tell you and focus you on the fact that it's going to be a bigger house or it's got that extra bedroom, maybe a water view, and then you finally get into that house, you're going to be pretty happy there if it's exactly what you wanted and it's going to be better for you. And I think that, you know, just as you said that really resonated with me, the whole concept of, you know, a lot of people with change happens. They're so reluctant to change, but we tend to justify it or, you know, describe why it would be better or we don't actually tell them about the outcome. We sort of just almost argue about the process and why they should be doing it, don't we? Yeah, it's kind of just hitting your head against the wall. So I think that's why what our leaders need to focus on is really what's the benefit of that technology or the change? How are my people impacted and what have that really good vision for the future? If you can focus everyone on the long game, you know, where we'll be at in the future, not just the sort of tough process, you know, because, you know, running a marathon is really hard. It's going to be painful and exhausting, but people still do it because they want the satisfaction of completing it and, you know, the better fitness or whatever the results from it. So there's sort of four of the key elements and I think what many organizations are doing at the moment how they're responding is impacting all of those. They've got projects and changes in the pipeline which impact all and that is a good way to make sure the whole system is aligned. So managing it as an enterprise transformation and that's particularly the case for significantly disrupted industries. The media sector for one is a big example which comes to mind. They're really in a fight for survival with, you know, Netflixs and the free content competing with print media and so forth. But also even, you know, banks have an ongoing transformation even though you might think they're in a quite comfortable position. There's a constant threat of fintechs, new startups coming, customers are still, you know, pretty unhappy with banks, don't necessarily see them in a positive way. So they have an ongoing transformation as well, really just to ready themselves for the future. And if anyone does have any questions about the specific situation that you're in at the moment or maybe some comments about change that your organization has recently gone through, please type it in the chat box. I've got the iPad right next to me so I'll see any questions come up and then we can really pick huge brain, especially as we go to the next bit. So, you know, this is all about leadership when it comes down to it and being that leader that does stand out from the rest through our change management processes. Do you think that we're doing a good job of guiding people through these? Because I think sometimes, you know, there is a big pat on the back when something works out right. But, you know, some change management processes could result in something amazing and then all your team leaves. Yes, I think, yeah, we've all seen that, I think. And as you said, you know, 70% or so of change efforts do fail to realize their intended outcomes. That might be because the solution that was chosen or that particular change was the wrong thing for that organization at the moment. So it's a strategy issue. Or it could be that the change was implemented poorly and I'd say the consensus is often that the change is implemented poorly. So leaders aren't necessarily doing a good job all of the time. And what we've seen, as you can see here, is a change or an evolution of how change is delivered or change is actually changing. Traditionally, the old school way is the size 11 approach which is the kind of military style leader who makes a change and if people don't do it, they're just going to kick them in the butt. I bet you love walking into organizations and being confronted with those guys. They still exist. They definitely still exist. And maybe sometimes you need to resort to that at a certain time. Maybe if you've got a recalcitrant employee and you need to sort of, you know, really make that change happen. But employees really, as we said, they have a bit more power these days and often they know more about what's going on, the best thing for the organization is sitting in, you know, the ivory tower calling the shots, but they aren't seeing the customer issues up front. They aren't seeing the frontline employees' experience. So leaders, more effective leaders will listen to employees to find out how they're impacted and is this the right strategy for them as well as the process for how to deliver it. So listening to how it should be done. Moreover, I think what we've seen in the last few decades is the rise of change management as a discipline. So a structured management of the change and that's why people like me have jobs specializing in change management and consultants that have those jobs largely came about in congruent with, you know, software development, more technology going to organizations. The techies and the leaders putting that in realize they can't just build a solution and hope people will figure it out because they're not all technical. But there needed to be a structure there to help people understand how to use those new systems, new ways of working. So change management was born as a discipline. But what we're seeing really right now and why we have this concept of the change intelligent leader and what Blue Seed really tries to do as an organization we help our clients become change intelligent organizations. So collaborative change is really the priority at the moment and making change part of business as usual. So not just having a project team or a bunch of technology people throwing a solution into the business and hoping for the best but making everyone in the business working really well together so that they implement it really, really well. And this is CQ and I think this is awesome because as soon as you put a Q in front of something I'm sold. I need to know this. So this is really what you were talking about before like the entire organization and everyone being involved in this process. Yeah, I mean leaders have a key role to play simply because there's on so many different people within the organization different parts of the organization when the CEO speaks usually there could be thousands, tens of thousands of people listening so what the CEO does is going to play a big impact same with all the leaders in the organization but everyone can play a role as well even if you're not in a formal leadership position so we believe everyone needs to have change intelligence, this CQ concept so we've got it obviously intelligence question your emotional intelligence question and now we say that change intelligence is really one of the key leadership imperatives and the imperative to survive in this VUCA world and not freak out. Yeah, and that probably plays in various aspects of someone's life not just within the workplace but it probably carries over into how they operate on so many levels. Yeah, I think so. So it's a blend of art and science we always say and being emotionally intelligent is part of it so being I guess level headed about what the craziness that's going on around you but also having I guess a structured way to thinking about change so having key tools and techniques for how you influence change in other people, how you bring others on the journey with you and how you take yourself along that change journey. I think it's a blend of lots of different things which is why we have this chart with lots of different words referring to what change intelligence is. It's just actually clicked to me it's a CQ. After all this time it worked. So we now understand that it's important and you know as organizations you know go into this next area of the unknown like you said that it's important to be this change intelligent leader. How do we know if we have the capabilities or the potential to be this and is there a point where we're like do you know what we can't be that person we are that size 11 guy what do we do then? Yeah, it's a really good question. I think one of the most important things is that you know the different roles within the organization are working together. So if you're struggling there should be lots of people that you can reach out to whether it's your leader, whether it's a different part of the business or if you see a problem with the change and you think it's not going to work for you that you do something about it. I think too often organizations and people within organizations will just accept oh yeah this change is just going to fail and I'm just going to let it fail and just like that other one. Yeah, so I think there's more that can be done than just that acceptance you shouldn't accept that things are just the norm that that's the way it is. Some organizations I go into you know I talk to one of the leaders or a middle manager and they say oh that person never talks to that department and that never happens and I sort of say well why? It's often not a very good answer it could be just like oh that's just the way it's always been Not acceptable Yeah, so I mean for me the job's easier the fix is there I say well okay we just need a team to actually talk to each other you need a process to do that whether it's a cross-functional team so the solutions are actually easier than you often expect and it's just a matter of looking for help for the right people. Okay, so here are the capabilities here so can we go through these just quite high level once again just to tell people online exactly what it all means how they can become this person or not they do have the capability to do so. Yeah sure, so I guess we've touched on some of this stuff the change intelligent leader you know these are just some examples of the capabilities that they might have and there's lots and lots of different capabilities and we teach businesses and leaders a lot of those in our training that we do but they understand the case for change and they track and measure change so they know what a change is trying to achieve they might hear about it from the CEO or the boss but they might not understand that immediately but they go and find out so they want to know is this going to save my people time how is it going to benefit our customers and they want to connect all the dots back to that benefit so that when they actually make the change in the organisation they can go and track it and they can see okay well is this new technology really saving my people time if it's not why not do we need to do something different or do we need to get the solution fixed so they're inquisitive and they're tracking success to make sure that it actually is sticking within their organisation they also understand the change drivers and they craft a compelling narrative as I touched on you know they know what's going on in the organisation environment and what I always say to people is that change isn't driven by organisations organisations really just adapt to change so when people say the boss is changing things again and blaming the boss and why are they doing this really the boss is just making the best of what's going on in the larger environment we're in a state at the moment globally where you know a 19 year old Harvard University dropout programming in his dorm room can actually do something which you know a few years later is going to be impacting billions of people on the organisation and changing the way we live our lives and changing the way we connect so that's how you know compelling the environment is at the moment do you ask you something a little bit off topic then do you feel like you know going back even to university or a high school we all you know change management internal external influences do you think disruption is just the new word for change I think disruption is we're focusing too much on it well disruption is definitely a term which is used a lot people say I'm going to disrupt this I'm going to disrupt this room as they walk into it you know it could mean anything but I think it's really it's just a catalyst for change effectively change as I said you know it's a process it's an outcome it's an adaptive process as well as a driving force and disruption is kind of really a trigger for that I think it's really a trigger for the change process and what you do in response okay so as a leader if you want to be this person here are the capabilities as an organisation so communicates top down bottom up you know is that something are these things set in stone or do you only have to have one or two of them yeah some may be more important for an organisation than others there's no prescriptive response I'd have to go and have a look at the organisation you have to go and consult yeah exactly I do ask questions before drumming this home but yeah it varies but I think as an organisation it's hard to just create a change intelligent organisation without creating change intelligent leaders you need to start at the top but you also need to look after the people in the middle and often they're the forgotten people the team leaders, the managers of people on the ground as well as the frontline employees so we need to listen to them and give them the skills and knowledge to actually be good at change and to actually make it stick because leaders can actually make a change happen but it's really the frontline people the team managers who are going to decide whether it actually sticks in the long term or they just go back to their old ways and start doing it the old way finding a work around or putting technology data in the system or whatever so it's about just involving them in the process and trying to give them the skills as much as possible so I think a lot of these things the capabilities of change intelligent organisation are how you know that your change intelligent leadership is doing a good job and encouraging those people in all levels of the organisation to play a role in it so change is everyone's job okay we've got a question from Alan on this slide so we'll get to this now what happens if you don't have a change intelligent leaders within change intelligent organisations or vice versa so that's quite interesting because you've got these two in an ideal world within the change can I just call it CQ organisation you've got a CQ leader but what if they're not fitting and what if you know is that where more change has to happen yeah that's a great question I'm sure there's lots of organisations that have that problem I think even in top organisations there's a mixture of change intelligence in terms of their leaders and we may not always even the most change intelligent people may not always be change intelligent at the time so it's a conscious thing but what I would say is that it's not just formal leaders within organisations which have the power to drive change and be change intelligent and create change intelligent organisations anyone can do it and it's just a matter of being proactive about it that example I said about if the change isn't working do something about it raise issues, question things so if you don't understand why a change is happening ask a question so that you do understand so hey we need to know why this is happening we need to know how we're going to benefit so that we make sure we make the most of this and we do benefit so don't be afraid to question leaders respectfully and encourage an influence of your peers as well there's people in the front line that might be more in the front line and speaking to customers all the time and understanding what's actually happening out there so what are your tips on bringing those people in this probably goes into the next thing I was going to ask you in terms of who does lead the change within an organisation how do you blend the two so there are different key roles within an organisation which influence change and it includes everyone as we said changes everyone's job additionally you know changes sparked or I guess by the leaders in an organisation so it could be the CEO or someone at that top level or a general manager who owns a budget to fund a change initiative we call them change architects at Blue Seat so they're the ones who have a vision for how the organisation should function in the future they usually cough up the money to make it happen so they have a solid stake in its success and they might sit on steering committees and try and make sure things are being done correctly you also have change enablers who are change managers or project managers, people who work in project teams consultants like myself who come in and try and build and deploy the change within the organisation and obviously they're quite a mature practice in many industries then you also have what we call change makers and we think they're one of the most important roles in an organisation and that's really the business itself so everyone from senior executives down to middle managers to the front line employees so what this CQ organisational system is implying is that all three of those roles need to really work together on any change initiative so if you're implementing a change as a change manager you need to go and consult the business and maybe it's a sales organisation you need to go and speak to some sales people and say hey will this technology work for you, how will it work how will your role be impacted what will you need to do differently what will that team over there need to do differently what are your customers going to think of this asking a lot of those questions and doing a real impact assessment and listening really really carefully to them so what happens in a non change intelligent organisation is the change enables and the architects will fund the change build it and then just kind of throw it over the fence to the business and they're sort of scrambling trying to go why is this happening why did we do this, we didn't want this so to avoid that it's really all three aspects all three elements of the organisation working together to make sure it's designed right and I think that's really a lot of what design thinking is a lot of organisations are using design thinking so thinking about what's the customer experience, what is it today what do we need it to be and thinking about what their needs are what are their preferences, what's the real problem we're trying to solve for them but also thinking of that in terms of employees so what's their experience today what do they want them to care about or what do they care about but we have to go and ask them to find that out to design the solution and the change process effectively okay definitely makes sense we do have a few questions coming in now so what I'm going to do, I'm going to please ask people to complete the feedback survey which you'll find in the tab on the top of the screen please complete that and we'll send you the recording because you'll no doubt want to share this with some other members in your team or the less intelligent yeah exactly, just don't tell them which one they are and then also there's some links here on the screen as well that Hugh has very kindly put together so this is more about Blue Seed where they can find more information or perhaps you yourself want to find out how he can help your organisation so there's details on there I'll send his details afterwards complete the survey, you get the recording, simple what I'm going to now is go through some questions so first of all and this is just going back to that slide which I'll take us back to which actually talks to those three people within the organisation so this is from Sophia within our organisation we put teams together for certain projects, is this similar to what you're talking about? yes so I guess the team that's put together for a project would fit into the change enabler component there and your change architects could be a sponsor the person providing funding or someone from that part of the business could work with you on a working group or a steering committee so what we're also saying is yep that's great have your project team they're important to build a software or system or design a new operating model whatever the case may be that they're delivering but involve the business leaders so whether it be a regional manager of a sales team or a state manager or whatever the impacted workforce is involve key people who really understand the customer understand the people who are affected and involve them in the design of the solution involve them in how the change is implemented so usually change managers will come up with a plan to implement how they're going to communicate the change how they're going to train people how they're going to engage people but before you do that you want to ask your business leaders your change makers what's going to be the best process for you to make sure we get the right outcome so if you have a question Sophia I think a lot of the time you're right we just create teams and we think oh we're helping the business grow we're helping this change happen but we're just one piece of the puzzle that's exactly the key takeaway so you build a project team absolutely important but it's not going to make success on its own it's really about the business and involving people yeah okay we have another question here so this one's from Nathan I think we managed change quite effectively however a lot of it isn't done within a certain time period do you have any recommendations? that's a great question and again it's case by case I think you have to ask a question on each case why it's not being done within a certain time period is it poorly forecasted do we not have good plans are we not consulting the right people in developing those plans to make sure they're achievable I think all objectives have to be smart so specific, measurable, achievable realistic and have a time attached to them so sometimes I think organizations can be very ambitious my experience is they underestimate sometimes how long it takes to adopt a change so they might underestimate the time to actually implement so sometimes we build a solution on time you have a good project manager people won't adopt it immediately and it takes them more time because it's really complicated they need to take time to learn it they need to take time to practice with a new system or practice in the new process and then they might need more support after they've had a go at it so I think there's no simple answer to the question it's more of an internal thing that might need to be yeah but I think one statistic I've seen recently is I hope I don't misquote it but I think it was projects that have effective change management are six times more likely to finish on time to budget and within the scope agree so I think change does have a big impact on time and schedule so if it is done well most people are happy, plans are really well thought out and it should go according to plan yeah and I think they probably feel like they've got the support of other people within the organization then don't they? and final question from Monique so if you do have any questions we'll get them through now our organization is quite reluctance to change what are your tips? do you think that we should actually survey people within our organization about what we need to change or do we leave it to top managers? that's a good question as well they're all really good questions I like the idea of a survey maybe how you go about it would be the key I think the reason I like surveys they may not always be the right way to go about it but at least it's asking for input and it's putting on us on people to say hey you want a better organization we want to do this for you so you the change makers out there we care about what you think and we're going to design something which is going to impact it where sometimes organizations fall down is that they fail to actually deliver on what the employees are telling them so everyone's done a survey or an engagement survey they talk about the things they don't like and then nothing happens thanks for your feedback no one cares yeah so that's my feedback on the survey I think it's good to ask questions and involve people but I would maybe try and establish more give them more of a formal role key people whether it's the most change averse people sometimes involving them very very closely in an effort to change your organization is a good thing because you can turn them around the most change averse person into a change supporter then that's going to be a powerful force for all their people because everyone will see even that person is buying into it maybe I should too yeah because normally they hate everything so that's one technique as well okay well that does bring us to the end so thank you very much I've got your details up on screen now like I said we will send through the recording within 48 hours final thoughts from you it's been great having you on you've touched so many different aspects and the thing I like about it is there's stuff in there that we can take away and apply or influence within our organization today which is always a great 40 minutes well spent in my book final thoughts what's your top tip for people out there well I think at Blue Seed our mission is really to make the entire world more change capable we want others to join us in this mission so I think the key takeaway for people I hope today is that you can be more capable of change thrive during change even with the VUCA world the volatile uncertainty all that stuff which sounds scary the future can be very very bright and I think we have to stay focused on that but also build our ability to manage change and try and help other people through that as well and influence other people so they become more change intelligent great wouldn't that be an ideal world be like avatar yeah thank you so much everyone for joining and we hope to see you at future business skills events have a great day thank you