 Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar on people-centered transformation. I would now like to introduce Tony Driscoll. Tony? Thanks very much Ryan. I really appreciate it and it's great to be here. I know we're all going through a lot of transformation right now and my hope over the next hour is that I can share some of the latest research that Brightline kindly sponsored about people-centered transformation and what we've learned about it in the hopes that when you leave here today, you will have something practical, tangible, and useful to do this afternoon. So my name is Tony O'Driscoll. I'm an adjunct professor at Duke University. I'm also a research fellow at Duke Corporate Education. I had a corporate career before my academic career where I had responsibility for learning strategy at IBM and prior to that I worked at Motel Networks as an engineer. So I don't know what I want to do when I grow up and so I just keep following my curiosity and so far that's worked. So what I'd like to do without further ado is get in and set a little bit of context for you as to where I think things are and what's going on. The first thing I have to do because I'm a professor now is I have to ask you to think about how many strategies, this is from Robin Speculand, how many strategies are successively implemented within organizations? Is it two out of ten, three out of ten, four out of ten, five out of ten or six out of ten? We don't have a poll for this one because I just threw it in for fun. So I want you to just ponder that. I'm going to give you about 20 seconds to think about it. What number of strategies are successfully implemented within organizations? I'm going to give you about 10 seconds to think about that. You want to put something in? We have A, we have two, we have three, we have B, we have A. So this is a pretty smart crowd. The answer is somewhere between three and three and four out of ten. What I'm showing on the right here is work from Robin Speculand, where he looks at the success rate of strategy implementation over time. And he cites a number of different studies, everything from his own study with bridges all the way through Kaplan and Norton down to bridges again. The trend is positive. It was 90, 90 percent failed. That was one in ten back in 2002. We've gotten better. We're at about 67 percent today, but that means that, you know, we have a long way to go to be successful in implementing strategy. And so there's lots of opportunity there. PMI puts the price of that at about two trillion a year, or the GDP of Brazil. So there's a lot of wasted time, energy and effort put into implementing strategies to change the business. And so that's what we want to dig into a little bit today. Now, my second, I promise, I'll be done with my professor, my professor qualms here in a sec, but I do have some fill in the blank and I'm going to go one by one on these. OK, so indulge me. This is a study from KPMG. I think it's 2016. And in 2016, there was an astounding some percentage of organizations were in some phase of transformation. What do you think two years ago, the astounder three years ago, the astounding percentage of organizations that were going through some phase of transformation? 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent, what percent? I'm looking at the questions bar to see if you can put in that fill in the blank for me here. Anyone? What percent of organizations were in some phase of transformation three years ago? All right, I'm seeing 90, 15, I'm seeing all over the map. So let me let me give you the answer according to KPMG. It was an astounding 96 percent of organizations that were in some phase of transformation three years ago. Today, that number is 100 percent. There is no organization institution or human being on this planet who is currently not going through a transformation, a transformation at the individual level about will my parents die? Transformation at the organizational level is will my company die? A transformation at the country level is will our institutions fail us? A transformation at the global level that asks how might we change our behavior collectively to combat a virus that that does not discriminate? And so we are in a we are in a really pivotal moment in time where we're now at a point where a hundred percent of organizations are in some phase of transformation and it's not like digital opportunistic transformation. Most of those were digital transformations to be more efficient or to have greater range and reach or something like that. This is an evolutionary transformation. When we come out of this, everything will be different. The new normal will be that nothing has returned to normal. And we have another state of being that we all have to to kind of adjust to. And that's going to require a significant lift in transformation. So if we if we go back to three years ago and we say how how did how did executives feel about the transformations that they were investing in? Only x percent believe that they could create short-term transformation wins three years ago from the 96 percent of the investment they were putting in. What percent of CEOs, this is 1600 CEOs around the world, believe that they were creating short-term transformation wins here? Anyone have a guess or a thought? 40, 80, 40, 50, 50. The answer is 51 percent. So 96 percent of them were were in some phase of transformation, largely digital transformation to to kind of move the organization forward to more opportunistic and only half of them just over half of them believe that they were going to get short-term wins from it. I mean, this is a this is a pretty significant gap. I'm investing it, but I've got a 50-50 chance that something will happen. Those aren't very good odds. The next film LeBlanc and only x percent believe that they can extract and maintain planned value from a future transformation effort. So not only am I going to get something out of the short-term, what percentage of these same CEOs 1600 of them? I'm seeing, you know 30, 80, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So so only x percent believe the answer to that one is only 47 percent believe. So here we are three years ago prior to coronavirus. Executives were knowingly investing and in transformation 96 of them. Half of them didn't believe they're going to get short-term wins and 47 percent of them didn't believe they could extract and maintain planned value. This is a problem. This is a problem. And today I would submit to you that it's an even bigger problem because we now have a you know, a Black Swan event that most of us because we think linearly and because we don't think complex in terms of complexity are not very well equipped to deal with it. So so in a way we've kind of we've hit this we've hit this inflection point on a global scale where where HMS strategy the boat that can move really fast the Titanic but it's not very agile so it doesn't know how to move around an iceberg that pops up. And because of the inertia of routines and practices and culture and everything else it's going to be really hard to steer that ship through the minefield that we're about to enter and we don't even know where the icebergs are and how they're going to pop up. And so clearly something must change. And what must change is the way that we change. The complication and this comes from BCG's works at Simple Rules Eid Moria. The complication the problem with all of this and why the Titanic hit the iceberg is that when you impose it complicated structural governance and procedural change on people when you say we are now whatever implementing a software tool changing the way that we engage with customers restructuring your organization firing your best friend when we impose that upon people people are three times more likely to become disengaged and what that means is they just shut down and the last thing we need at this point in time is any of our people in any of our organizations shutting down discretionary effort the work you will do because you believe it's important to do is the most important fuel source we have to call upon as individuals, as organizations, as nations, and as a global community to increase the likelihood of a good outcome for society and humanity. And without discretionary effort we're dead and I mean dead. So this is not something to take very lightly and so the challenge and the research Brightline kindly invested in was to kind of try to understand what it is why is it that these numbers are so bad and why is it that we even accept them and one of the big findings is that you know a blinding flash of the obvious perhaps that organizations cannot change unless they're people change organizations as Charles Handy said are nothing but people and so most transformation efforts fail because they overemphasize the tangible aspects of change a structure a process a routine a piece of software and they underestimate the emotional side of change which is how does that feel for the people who are going to have that change imposed upon how could we have empathy for the human beings who are called upon to actually make the really difficult thing of unlearning something and learning something new so that's the challenge that's the challenge so so organizations can't change unless people change and for people to change we have to understand a bit more about psychology we have to understand a bit more about empathy and that's what people center transformations all about Brightline's people manifesto which I highly encourage you take a look at was one of the starting points and the idea here is that people form the link between strategy design coming up with something we have to do to change the business and strategy delivery getting it done it's people that turn ideas into reality people put the strategy in motion a friend and colleague Larry Prusak most definitely says this me says people make organizations stop or go and if they're going to make the organization go they have to believe in what's happening and they and if they don't believe in what's happening the change just saps them of all energy and so what I uncovered in this research is something not my words but I love the words it's called the tyranny of the tangible is that organization change works when you identify the beliefs and behaviors you want to change and then you create new structures processes and governance mechanisms to support those beliefs and behaviors it doesn't work the other way around but that's what we're doing that's the problem the problem is that most organizational transformation efforts which fail have put the tangible core cart the structure the systems the process all that tangible stuff that we can point to the reorg chart the new the new ERP system the new compensation mechanism they put that ahead of the emotional levers of experiences beliefs and behaviors and the more that you layer that on top it's like the the horse is just trying to push the cart uphill into a deep dark hole and has no motivation to do it and if there is no motivation there is no change and so we we've over rotated from my perspective on the emotional cart in front of the in front of the tangible the tangible cart in front of the most so the the work that I was asked to do this year by Brightline was to kind of really take a deep look at the literature and my own experience in driving large transformations and organizations and try to figure this out and so I had two inputs to start with in this research journey the first was an input from our friends in the agile world so the software agile world and if you if you know the history of agile and how it came about in 2001 17 kind of like-minded software engineers came together and developed this manifesto for agile software development and the key thing is it had it had it had four value shifts that all software developers needed to needed to take on in their mindset and then 12 principles but the key the key part the key lever that we learned in speaking with our friends from the agile world was this these four shifts were what really mattered individuals and interactions mattered more than process and tools working software mattered more than comprehensive documentation customer collaboration mattered more than contract negotiation responding to change mattered more than following a plan the stuff on the right you still valued the stuff on the left you valued more and if you took those values in in implementing the principles of agile you were successful so that was that was the first input I had the second input I had was the people manifesto where Brightline took some of the brightest transformation lines from BCG from from around the world from telecom large telecom company in Saudi a large set of stakeholders who were practitioners who had deep experience in organization transformation and they came up with a people manifesto where they suggested that leadership is overemphasized and we need to think more about policy that collaboration is key but it's not everything because we can get into collaboration overload if we over collaborate that culture is never built it was purposely kind of provocative here that you know culture must be nudged you can't approach culture directly and that finally at the end of the day people act in their own self-interest that that people make the they consciously or unconsciously do the calculus as to whether or not they want to go through the very difficult process of unlearning to create room to relearn to create the absorptive capacity to take on something new and then the difficulty of routinizing that new belief into a habit so those are the those are the two inputs that I had and then I went on a research journey for for for the summer and this is what came out so what came out obviously is a little bit more complex than what we started with the idea here is how do you create an agile organization and in order to do so it's kind of a to the power five model in order to get agility you need to make sure that you have a shared aspiration that everybody's aligned around it that people are given autonomy to follow that shared aspiration and that they at the same time have the accountability in delivering on that aspiration if they're given the autonomy and in order to do that there's kind of a network of things that have to happen there's not necessarily a sequence to them but these are the closest I could get to me see mutually explosive collectively exhaustive and what I'd like to do now is I'd like to go through each one of these and now we're going to get a little bit interactive because we have a polling mechanism I see we've got a 200 or so folks online and you know I am an academic so I'm looking for some data and what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go through in a people centered way I'm going to introduce each one of these components by introducing a human being I'm going to ask you if you can recognize that human being that'll be a little bit of a quiz I'm going to share a very compelling perspective that they have and the learning that came from it then I'm going to share the three value shifts that matter for this particular element learning from our friends in agile and then I'm going to ask you to take a PCT pulse question it's one question that I'm going to ask you to just rate your own organization on this particular element I'm going to gather that data and then afterwards when we open for the Q&A we'll drill into the one that this whole group believes would be the one that's most important to focus on so that's where we're going all right so the first one I think we know who this man is uh it's Martin Luther King and on March on August 28 1963 250 million people descended on the march on Washington and and they heard the most eloquent of speeches and I love the words the words are so oh hold on that's not what he said is it no he didn't say I have a plan he said I have a dream and I often wonder what would have happened on that fateful day when quarter of a million showed up if Martin Luther had said I had a plan because I'm not sure that the transformation that followed would have happened if he'd said I had a plan and why do I believe that that's the case I believe that that's the case because the research shows that people must believe in the achievement of a shared aspiration they must believe it's possible and they must believe it's worthy of their effort before they're willing to change their behavior to make it happen so belief comes before behavior and experience comes before belief and so the experience that was created on that day in 1963 with this man with such a profound capability of narrative changed the course of the world and so if we want to at this point in time do the same there's a couple of values that we have to shift the first is we need to emphasize the shared aspiration over the required action yes we need the required action of stay in place yes we need the required action of don't go see your grandparents right now and we need the shared aspiration of when we get through this will be stronger in X amount of time we will we will we will never forget we will never forget the simple beauty of giving somebody a hug or the roar of a crowd at a football stadium or whatever it is but we will be better for it and we will appreciate it more that's a shared aspiration the required actions are the things we do we will have more compliance those required actions if we can get everybody under and the shared aspiration if we can dream together for a future that's better for all of us we have to articulate that possible future over the problem like present we have lots of problems to deal with today the urgency the turning of the urgent is huge but if we're not aiming for a shared possible future that informs how we make decisions and problem like present we're going to be in trouble and we need to not at this time it's going to here lead into the purposeful why not just the action of walking out but it's kind of paradoxical but any most this is the tyranny of the urgent not the tyranny of the tangible but if you put the tyranny of the tangible together with the tyranny of the urgent what you end up getting is a series of of knee jerk reactions around tasks we believe to be correct and they add up to something that is sub par that is sub optimized because it's it's not systemic and it's a level below so so unless we have leaders who can articulate shared aspiration of possible future that has a purposeful why to guide our collective action around the required action to deal with the problematic present and the actual what and how we're going to be in trouble it's just the research is it's pretty clear on that so poll number one having covered communicated compelling change narrative which is the the essence of a people centered transformation model is this question and and ryan can we see the poll now hopefully the group should be able to see the poll the question that i want to pull you on there it is is our leaders communicate a clear concise consistent and compelling narrative that makes a purposeful passionate and emotionally resonant case for change how well is your organization doing that today do you strongly disagree with the fact that that's what's going on in your organization do you strongly agree where are you on that so so i'm going to say we're mostly yeah okay we're mostly here i'm just trying to track it so we can so we can um so we can figure it out all right next one so now we're just gonna we're in the loop now we're on a learning curve so we can move quicker so the next one is i think we all know this person it is Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi when he basically began his kind of his transformational effort around civil disobedience it started in April of 1930 so we're actually going further back from even in fact Martin Luther King learned a lot from from Mahatma Gandhi's kind of civil disobedience approaches and so when he started the salt march where he marched 240 miles from Ahmedabad where he where he lived to to the arabian sea he created a movement literally created a movement a lot of people walking with him for 240 miles and and and he's well known for this particular quote that is you must be the change that you wish to see in the world and so in order to be the change that you must see in the world leaders have a huge responsibility because you today more than any day because tomorrow will be yet again different because we're in an exponential context here it'll be it'll be it'll be twice as bad and it'll be less predictable um so leaders who deliberately act their way into a new way of thinking are more successful in changing their own behavior and motivating change behavior in others and so this is not a time for sitting back and trying to figure it out this is a time where the conditions require that we just test and learn our way forward in order to do that we have to let go of our notion of control and we have to lean in to um finding things out collectively right and this is Hermania Ibarra's research from in sead uh and it it's about acting our way into a new way of thinking and if we're going to act to think differently the first thing we have to do as leaders the most important thing is we have to demonstrate change behavior we have to be the change not demand change behavior from others demanding change behavior without behaving that way yourself will completely undermine your change initiative it's just not going to happen secondly be authentic and open over be authoritarian authoritarian and overbearing this is not the time to bark out orders this is a time to show your vulnerability your authenticity and and and invite others in because together we're better because together we can figure things out there is no human being on the planet who individually knows what to do it is only through our collective inquiry with openness and appreciation of diversity of perspective that that our society and that our humanity can succeed um and and and please embrace trying and learning overthinking and planning there there has never been in the history of the world a situation that's similar to now we had the 1918 pandemic etc etc but as it is right now with all of the tools we have at our disposal for collective sense making uh we have a real shock as long as we don't overthink and over plan and and as long as we try and learn and then we quickly distribute what is working across the planet on the internet platform so so that's what acting to think differently is all about poll number two our leaders generate respect and followership from others by personally authentically and openly modeling the change beliefs and behaviors required to evolve the organization how well does your organization do that today do you strongly agree with that or disagree in terms of your leaders to open that poll all right this one is about here got it now we're going to go even faster okay because now we've been through two iterations now I have a pop quiz though because anybody know you can put it into the questions box does anybody know who this is I'm sure you knew who Martin Luther King was and I'm sure you knew who Gandhi was but who is this person anyone I'm going to scanning down here Mary Pollitt that's close in area Marie Curie it is Mary Parker Follett which I'm guessing Nyara was get was get Mary Parker Follett was a US social worker who was born in 1968 and she is do those of us in the academic literature she is the she is if Peter Drucker is the father of modern management Mary Parker Follett is the mother and one of her really useful and helpful quotes I think at this point in time is that written in 1912 1912 leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led I think that those words I think that hearkening those words in this difficult time would do us all well leaders must embrace what Amy Edmison calls situation humility by showing vulnerability seeking help asking questions and demonstrating that failure is acceptable we have to fail to find a new path forward humility builds a foundation of trust and psychological safety again Amy's work that gives others the confidence to engage in open transparent and authentic interactions around change I can't think of a time when we need that more than today and so if we're going to do that back to our friends from the agile manifesto what will we have to do we have to show vulnerability over projecting power this is a very very difficult one you go back to Churchill and you think about how he balanced this kind of you know we're in this together it's going to happen but at the same time not sugarcoating it like I've got it all under control the key calm and carry on thing only lasts so long until people start to lose that track so finding the right balance between projecting power because today nobody believes that anybody knows the answer so let's show our vulnerability and let's invite people in so that we can collectively come to understand which means that we have to ask more questions over mandating direction the things we know that work from expertise we should follow but we should also be asking questions of those experts and not just experts about epidemiology experts about human behavior experts about how do we actually how do we actually change behavior on the ground people like Larry brilliant to who eradicated Ebola I mean he knows what to do he's been in that context let's get let's get him into the discussion about what it takes on the ground to make this happen and then let's all follow that lead after asking asking him the questions so in this most difficult of times we paradoxically have to make failure safe that we try something it doesn't work we back up and go forward overplaying it safe because we if we overplay it safe and this comes to the big question that's being dealt with today is when you have a dual crisis of health and economy and and that they're kind of the curves bend in opposite ways it's a very very tight needle to thread on making that happen because there's there's there's just from a macro policy perspective between kind of the people being on life support and the economy being on life support and the mixture of the two in my opinion as a human being it's score one for the human side of the system however when we come out the other side we can't have our institutional platforms that that run the planet kind of decimated because because they because we'd have to start all over again and so it's a very very difficult blend of managing these these pretty complex things where we kind of understand what the outcome is and what the curves look like but we have to find our way forward together and I mean together globally to do that so your leaders do they show vulnerability do they seek help do they demonstrate that failure is acceptable are they consistently seeking to increase the autonomy and accountability of others to go figure things out how are we doing on that as a group we could pull up the pole see how we're doing on this one okay it's about there all right in the interest of time I'm going to march on this is Steve Jobs Steve Jobs very famously when he came back to apple apple had just a proliferation of products and decided you drew a two by two on the board he said computer he said laptop a pc consumer business and basically killed all products including one named after his daughter the apple lisa and said we have to focus and and and he's there's a great tape videotape of him talking through this but fundamentally his his key quote is focus is about saying no when when we're dealing with this right now this is rob cross and rob's research rob's a good friend and colleague we're in collaborative overload that that right now we have to get super clear on what it is we should collaborate on and we need to do that by selecting the things that matter most the vital few change in interest initiatives that matter most and we need to coordinate those on a global scale which is not easy given the current institutional frames we have the institutional frames we have today kind of came out of the breton woods system and and they were built for a different time of the day that's for sure and so so to be quite honest in order for us to make it out of this we need a level of institutional innovation that's about the same as the level of technical innovation we have at the internet our current institutional structures and forms are no longer suited to the reality that we're operating in and so that's going to be a very important um that's going to be a very important thing that we have to start working on immediately because because this particular pandemic from the people I've been talking to is the dress rehearsal for the one where there's an even more pernicious combination of something that's more deadly that has a longer asymptomatic period and so and so we've got to get this right and we've got to get right relatively soon um so we have to then focus on saying no we all know we let projects go through the system too much uh so we have to say no to it over letting it go through the stage gate process we have to we have to pick the right things to focus on we need ruthless prioritization of our holding options that we have to hold some options there's no question I mean because that's what optionality is but but the thing about living in a complex world is that you start to you start to run out of options so you know you can have an option like um like stay at home and then you can have an option like stay in place and then you can have an option like you know forced curfew and then you can have but but there's only so much you can do and you need to parse those out because when you run completely out of options that's when that's when human panic sets in and so we want to parse those options out but we don't want to be we don't want to be trying in this context we actually have less options to hold in a positive context we have more options to hold and we tend to hold on to too many because we don't like to lose that's loss aversion that's a that's a behavioral bias that we have um and the last thing is we really need to focus our attention over just measuring action so if we can focus our collective attention on the things that matter most like um I don't like the word social distancing I think physical distancing is better I think we should be as social as we possibly can over media where where we're not at risk um anyway that's just my point so number four our leaders bring clarity and focus by prioritizing and communicating the key strategic priorities that matter most to the business and we are seeing CEOs coming out right now left and right I highly recommend you look at Arnie Sorenson from for Marriott I think that I think the way that he addressed his his community his company his employees um about about the state of affairs with Marriott was exemplary as a leader there so we're down the curve now we are running a little I'll stop talking as much I sorry but I'm a little passionate about these things given what's going on um so Ryan I'll look to you for guidance on where we're at absolutely we're at about 68 percent right now all right when we get to 70 let's just reveal I'm trying to see if one pops that people want to talk about when we get through you bet bigger that's a problem interesting how many people do we have on this 227 interesting okay well it's not surprising because uh in times in times of in times of stress we tend to look to leadership uh but we're saying that we're not we're not very confident in our leadership today okay well that's that's um that's why being a leader sucks want to talk about cool a cool leader uh this is I don't know if anybody knows who this is let's do a little quiz on that does anyone know who this is if you're from America you would if you're from somewhere else you may not um anybody in the questions box who is this man Lombardi Vince Lombardi that's right so Vince Lombardi is um a U.S. American football coach that's for Europeans that's not the round ball it's the it's the rugby looking ball and he was the head coach of the Green Bay Packers and in the 1960s he won five out of seven NFL which would be like the Premier League if you will and two Super Bowls and in his whole football career he never ever had a losing season so to say that this this gentleman was a was a leader who could motivate people to run through brick walls is an understatement because that's essentially what you have to do if you're crazy enough to play American football um and and his quote that I think is relevant for us today is individual commitment to a group effort that's what makes a teamwork that's what make a company work and that's what makes society work amen brother I think he's dead on I think he's dead on to unlock discretionary effort that is the fuel I'm going to do it because I believe it's important to do it I'm going to do whatever it takes to do it I'm not going to do it because I'm told I'm going to do it because I believe that my contribution is going to yield an outcome that is something I want to see happen so to unlock that discretionary effort leaders must focus on the intrinsic motivational leaders that compel people to go the extra mile what will motivate people orders don't motivate people aspiration motivates people you have to tap into their aspiration and then you have to give them the autonomy to do it but you have to tell them I'm giving you the autonomy but we're clear on the outcome and you're accountable for the outcome so do not what tiger mom or micromanage go for manage people be clear on the outcome and let them be as creative as possible to achieve it so how do we do that we have to channel their aspiration over a mandating direction nobody knows the direction we'll find that out collectively we have to motivate inspiration over manipulate with fear if we manipulate with fear the prefrontal cortex shut down we we can't actually think creatively we go into limbic system and we by definition will repeat the errors of the past and as I showed earlier the errors of the past are not very good we're not very good at implementing strategic change and my gosh we need implement we need to implement strategic change at a rate and success rate far higher than we ever have before and so we have to recognize effort over requiring conformity we don't even know what to describe to to conform around today that that's a that's a fool's errand and so so recognizing people's efforts their discretionary effort to find the right way forward is what we need to do number five our leaders understand how to motivate our discretionary effort the work will do because we believe in it and want to do it by tapping into our aspirations the aspirations of others and giving them the autonomy to do it how well does your organization or does your leadership system do that today okay we're better in this one all right good let's let's move on then uh next one uh anyone know who this is quick parkways in the interest of time just because i'm watching the clock this is charlene lee charlene has been with the altimeter group and been kind of a she's really looked a lot at what's going on with since the internet's come out she wrote a great book recently called the disruption mindset which i highly recommend her her big quote is that agency is a two-way street if you're going to give agency like let somebody have agency do it themselves um that power comes with responsibility and accountability so her definition of agency is and and her research shows that organizations that give people agency that give them the license to make decisions and take independent actions without approval are far more likely to succeed in organization transformation so as an organization is trying to transform particularly in an unpredictable context where where we don't know the answer by definition we're in we're in complexity or chaos then then the sensors at the edge of the organization have a better intuition of what to do i think about rudy juliani during during uh during the crisis in new york that that was a if you if you're familiar with davis noden's knephen framework that was kind of a sense and respond type thing where you're trying to get the get the get the intuition of what's working at the edge and then just keep trying until you can find a way forward that's the kind of context that i think we need to be thinking about we're operating in so giving others agency we need give and take reciprocity over top-down hierarchy i want to be clear i'm not saying that things on the right don't matter it's exactly the same as the agile manifesto the things on the right matter and that's at the core but we need to push out from that core by testing the boundaries a little bit if we're going to deal with this highly complex situation that we're that we all are dealing with second is encouraging independent action over requiring prior permission but that if we if everything has to go through a decision cycle where there's prior permission the system's going to get gummed up because the hierarchy won't be able to handle the flow of decisions that have to get made which means we have to give agency and trust over exercising authority we can of course exercise authority about making sure people stay in place but we also have to give people agency about how we think about better ways to to have people adhere to those particular rules like teenagers on the beach in florida for instance um so number six our leaders create agency by giving others the permission to take independent actions and make changes without approval without hierarchical approval this gets to the kind of the one of the weaknesses of the hierarchical system when it gets when it gets over overstuffed with decisions is that things grind to a halt and we can't we can't do that right now okay not as bad all right good good good let's let's move on um appreciate you hanging with me here uh decentralized decision-making if Mary Parker Follett was the father of management this is Peter Drucker he is the he's the father Mary Parker Follett was the mother um decentralized decision-making uh Peter's got many many good quotes but i love this one in most organizations the bottleneck is at the top of a bottle if i had a bottle i do have a bottle there's a bottle there's the top um and this is a problem when you have a hierarchical system and you have a and it's embedded inside a network of of unpredictable events the system gets gummed up and so what we end up is the flow the flow and friction inside the system kind of just grinds to a screeching halt and and we can we can borrow from Roger Martin here uh Roger Roger says it's best to think about organizations as decision factories and he argues that leaders should only make the choices that they are best equipped to make and then create the boundaries within which those who outside of their expertise who are the best to make the decisions should do it and that that all should be guided by a shared aspiration and so in order to do decentralized decision-making you have to lean in and value expertise and experience over position and role uh you have to explain the rationale for your decision rather than just expecting agreement for your decision people want to know why you made a particularly decision before they're going to follow you and you have to cascade decisions rather than centralizing because if you centralize them you move slow and and i'm not saying these are easy but i'm saying the the the research is pretty clear that those who have been successful in dealing with the kind of environment we're in today have leaned this way and valued these over that it doesn't mean that the thing on the right has to go away it means that we need to know when to deviate from it in order for us to find a new way forward that's allows us to be more agile which is what we need to be all right ryan let's go our leaders make the choice make only the choices they are best equipped to make clarify the choices others have to make and the boundaries within which to make them how well are we distributing decision making throughout the network of the leadership system in your organization how are we doing okay we're doing good on that nice all right moving right along moving right along we're running out of time uh anybody know who this person is i'm going to tell you because i don't have time it's john cotter uh and john if you know john obviously was was kind of while still is very much involved in change and came up with these change wheel and all that but but but of late i'd highly recommend that you take a look at these new work it's called accelerate um and in accelerate he makes the argument that we need a second operating system within organizations that's devoted to the design and delivery of strategy that uses an agile network like structure so you know there's a fantastic youtube video just look up cotter and second operating system he talks about the left is a hierarchy that's optimized for profitability in the current business model the right is a network of kind of entrepreneurs and people who are finding the next future for the organization and every company is going to have to learn how to run a dual operating system so leaders must exercise their position power within the hierarchy to influence and override the traditional hierarchical system to create time and space this is important our cross-functional teams to emerge converge and engage around critical decision and delivery interfaces so the hierarchy left to its own devices will kill the new because it's there to maximize profit and that's important because as it's maximizing profit it's throwing off cash to invest in our future so it's only natural that we would have the hierarchy to be optimized to do that however if we don't have the lead jeep that's searching for the new pastures within which to seed the new sources of profitability we're going to die and we're going to die faster in a world that's becoming less predictable and so managing two operating systems one that's geared for efficiency and profitability and one that's geared for identifying new opportunity that and they both they run on different fuel they are different systems and you have to run them in parallel this is where i'm a dexterity comes into play that's the leader's challenge so if we're going to catalyze this network we have to think about informal networks over organization hierarchies we have to think about using organization network analysis to understand who are the people we need to convene over organization restructuring organization restructuring is always going to lag the marketplace it always has it always will so in a way it's a little bit of a it's a little bit of a fool's errand to do that you keep your structure in place to maximize profitability but you use your network to orbit that hairball and to find the new futures it's a different structure that's more commensurate with the reality of the environment that we're leaning into and then you have to have emergent collaborative teaming which means it's not like we're going to assign a cross-functional team where we hear the perspective of operations and HR and finance we're going to based on the discretionary effort of people and their expertise allow them to self convene to solve the problems okay number eight we're going to make this we're going to make it we've got 10 minutes our leaders create time and space for cross-functional teams to emerge converge and engage around crucial strategy designs delivery interfaces how well does your organization create slack how well does it create time and space for absorptive capacity to take on shock and an autonomy for people to kind of self select into these new emergent spaces where they think they can contribute either because of their energy and passion and enthusiasm or because of their expertise how well do we do that okay got it moving right along friends this man is Peter Senghi those of you who've been around learning for a long time would know him from learning organization but of course all of these folks who who started out in one area they're always close to their domain like john has moved a little bit and changed some more networks change um peter's moved from always about leadership but more now to systemic leadership this is the key thing real change starts at recognizing that we as leaders are part of the system we seek to change we're not outside of it looking at it but we're in it so whatever we do will change it by definition that's what a complex adaptive system is and so in order for us to solve you know albert einstein said a problem should be reduced to its simplest form but no simpler that's what he calls the law of requisite complexity and we have to acknowledge that today we're dealing in a world that's far more complex than we're often willing to acknowledge and we too often want to say that the answer is simple and let's let's let's break it down and today i think we need a new kind of leader not just me i'm obviously i would i would bow to peter on this but i strongly agree with his hypothesis a systems leader who can catalyze the collaborative leadership required to successfully navigate dynamic complex and systemic change we do not have a leadership system every other part of an organization has a system an ERP system an MRP system a payroll system we don't really think of leadership as a system and a system that resides within the organizational organism not that's something that's outside of it we put too much leadership attribution error this is this is a barb kellerman from from harvard we attribute too much to the the awesome leader yes mahat madhani was fantastic yes jfk was fantastic whatever martin luther king but behind them was an army of people that that created the conditions for them to shine there's one and only one responsibility only one requirement globally for leadership to exist and that's that you have followership and and and you don't engender followership unless you you create trust and a bond and a shared aspiration with people and so every one of these leaders we call out has has a huge network of kind of people who share in that aspiration they just happen to be the face at that particular time so if you're going to lead the system we need to think about six systemic collective leadership over functional hierarchical leadership we need to think about catalyzing and guiding change over controlling and monitoring compliance we need to think about adaptive leadership systems over technical leadership practices again i am not saying the stuff in gray doesn't matter i'm taking this directly from agile and how agile they came it is not discrediting the stuff on the right because that's where we are today it's asking at what point in time do we want to pull our value set out so that we can find a new way forward because the current way is not working so nine our leaders catalyze the collaborative leadership required to successfully navigate dynamic complex and systemic change how well do your leaders do that okay i got that one there's clearly one that's popping as the one that we let's see let's see if the last one the last one is is okay who is this this is lucursner i worked at ibm during the transformation when lou was there followed by sam um 460 000 odd people changing the company from a product-based company to a service-based company um all my gray hair is due to that and when lou was when lou left ibm uh he was asked well why why why did you leave i mean you're on top of the world after the biggest turnaround ever he's like i was exhausted this was before the apple turnaround he's like it's just really really hard work um and then he wrote a book and when he wrote the book he called a book teaching the elephants teaching the elephant to dance and in that when you open the book he said uh i came to see that in my time at ibm the culture isn't just one aspect of the game it's the game but culture our shared assumptions that we hold to be self-evident in a pernicious way because they're almost unconscious um that's that's what dictates the pace and scale of change in an organization no no eloquently articulated strategy that's beautiful in its clarity and simplicity ever sees the light of day unless the culture maps to that strategy and it's very rare that it will because culture is just hard-coded structure and process and routine from the last time we had a strategy to transform the likelihood of that culture fitting the need that you have for a new strategy is like zero or close to zero you're trained as an academic never to say zero but it's infinitesimally small so the problem with culture is that it acts as a limiting and resistive force to the design and delivery of a strategic change initiative it's it's like it looks at strategic change as an antibody it develops antibodies it's like it's like a virus i i got i got to throw up antibodies to stop that thing because that thing's going to kill me so while culture itself is notoriously hard to change so we can't just throw up our hands it can't be left to chance we have to nudge it forward so what we have to do through each of those nine elements i mentioned earlier by shifting our values a little bit so we have to nudge the culture and to do that we need to lean into the human and emotional side of change particularly now there's so much stress on every human being on the planet over the technical and rational change we have to think about empath empathetically how are people going to feel there's a feeling word about this change and how might we make it less painful for them focus on the the pct elements over tackling culture directly you don't go straight out culture you can't go straight out culture you have to go to the antecedents of culture and you have to nudge it forward it's over time that it shifts so we have to nudge the culture over leaving it to chance number 10 our leaders consciously and continuously nudge the culture in the direction of aspiration alignment autonomy and accountability all right how are we showing okay watching back all right uh survey says and poll says number four uh leaders bring clarity and focus by prioritizing and communicating the key strategic priorities that matter most is the thing that we disagree with the most as a group of 250 so i'll take that data thank you very much for the data and i'll put this in we're going to start to get smarter about how all this stuff works but in the interest of time now uh let's come full circle on pct so so we started with the value shift idea from our friends in agile we had the four basic themes of the of the people manifesto and we built out this particular pct framework um and the key thing in the pct framework is it puts the emotional horse back in front of the tangible car so so by going towards a shared aspiration and leaning into creating the kinds of experience that allow those value shifts to happen that then changes beliefs and behaviors and the structure system and process will take care of itself but if you take that car and you put it in front of the horse it just feels to the horse like you're going into a black hole and that's not positive now what can we do about this ourselves uh this is this is toll story everybody thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself he did say himself back then but ourselves i would say and so and so i believe that leaders everyone i'm talking to here today because a leader by definition is anybody who has a follower as a father i'm a leader because i have kids as you know we all are leaders in our own domain and the small what i'm trying to do is find what's the smallest change in leadership behavior that can lead to a big positive change so my five pct my my five-point pct call to action for you please do it today is number one take the pct pulse for yourself for your organization for your family whatever it is number two pick one element just one focus all of your attention on the one element that scores the lowest number three within that element pick the one value shift that you think would be most important not all three at the same time are you going to focus on channeling aspiration are you going to focus on recognizing effort and then fill out an mbd list three specific things you're going to do to shift that value more of better or differently to nudge that shift in the direction you're going to go log it make sure that you are doing it daily and it will become a habit this is bj fogs micro habits and when you feel like that one's stuck rinse and repeat it is now 12 o'clock i managed to get through without letting anybody ask a question i feel bad about that but i feel very grateful for the 200 people that spent time here i'm happy to stay and answer questions i'm not sure what the policy is um we can take questions on email we'll send a follow-up and the webinar will be available please take care of yourselves take care of each other and remember that nothing changes unless people change and we have to be empathetic about it namaste i wish you all well