E152 – Leading Transformational Change (w Ian Ziskin)

E152 The Secret Sauce for Lead…ational Change with Ian Ziskin

SUMMARY KEYWORDS transformational change, leadership development, COVID-19 impact, remote work, economic uncertainty, political division, defining reality, cognitive biases, listening skills, employee engagement, failure acceptance, organizational culture, data analytics, future of work, HR orchestra This is the world of work podcast with James and Jane.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The World of Work podcast. We are super excited today to be speaking about one of the topics that we really enjoy, which is change and transformational change. And we've done a range of exploration to this topic in the past, but we're really excited today to be speaking to Ian Ziskin, who is, amongst other things, an offer of a book The Secret Sauce for leading transformational change that's just come out. We are early in the summer of 2022 and we'll be picking his brains and getting some some thoughts on change before we get into, I guess, some of the topics within the book and your thoughts. Could you introduce yourself to the audience? Ian, and say a little bit about yourself and your background? James,

great to be with you, and thanks very much for having me, Yes, happy to tell you a little bit about myself. I've been in the human resources and leadership game now for a little over 40 years. Career basically divided into two separate but related pieces. First, 28 years I spent working for large companies, mostly in one way or another, in the HR field, and toward the latter part of my corporate life, I was the chief HR officer for two companies, most recently a company called Northrop Grumman in the aerospace and defense industry absolutely loved my corporate career, lived all over the United States, traveled all over the world, got a chance to try and learn and do a lot of different things, perhaps also made every mistake that could be made along the way. So learned a lot from that as well. And then about 12 years ago, the entrepreneurial side of me started to emerge a little bit. I founded my own coaching and consulting firm called exec Excel group, and that's a portfolio of things, coaching senior leaders, doing a lot of leadership development work and a variety of other advisory work, both to large companies but also to smaller, more entrepreneurial companies, which has been a fantastic experience for me as well. And then sprinkled within all of those things, have managed to author or co author four books, including this one that you just mentioned, the secret sauce for leading transformational change, which actually just came out at the beginning of June. So I'm very excited to be able to have the opportunity to be with you, share a little bit about some of the learnings from the book, and share those with your audience as well. Brilliant.

Thanks. And, you know, I think the audience knows I grew up in the States, and I grew up in Charlottesville, in Virginia, and we had a North office on the road into town. I used to drive past it and see it evolve and things like that. And I've actually

got, I've been to that, that office, right? Okay, to be responsible for that, that facility, and been to Charlottesville actually, a number of times, a beautiful place.

Yeah, we probably crossed paths there, unbeknownst to each of us. Yeah, how funny. So I guess, if I just start at the beginning, you know, there are a lot of books on transformational change. A lot of it pops up in, I guess, some of the academic world and in the, you know, the broader sort of business world as well, with different views on it and and I guess the question is, why did you choose to write about this topic now? What was it about now? Or what was it about this topic that really sort of captured you and led you to write this book?

Yes, a combination of a few things, I think really drove me to do this. First and foremost, we've all lived through the last two now, almost two and a half years of big, transformational change dealing with COVID, 19 pandemic, and like a lot of other people sitting around my my house, you know, watching what was going on in in the world, not only dealing with, of course, the health challenges and, you know, all the unfortunate illnesses and even worse, millions of deaths around the world, but also the impact on economic uncertainty and companies trying to figure out how to basically overnight move to remote work, where possible, schools doing. Same with remote school, certainly in the United States and I think maybe other countries as well, a fair amount of political division unfolding, both related and unrelated to the Coronavirus pandemic. So that really got me thinking quite a bit about, you know, how do people survive and even potentially thrive in periods of large scale transformational change. The other thing, which was an important supplement to that, is I happen to have co founded and now lead a consortium of about 75 independent coaches and consultants, many of whom, not all, but many of whom are quite interested in and actually expert in, the subject of leading transformational change. And so we decided to collaborate on a book that would bring a collective voice to the topic of change, but also try to do it in a way that welcomed divergent thinking and diverse points of view. So it was important for me in pulling the book together as the lead author, not to have it be a book that was, you know, one guy's view of the world, but rather a collective view. So now I'm fond of calling it 200 voices and under 200 pages, because we've gotten quite a cross section of input from people, which I'm excited about. But also to try to do it in a way that is brief enough, literally, you know, 199 pages, because, as our publisher told us, and many others have reminded us, people don't read books anymore, you know, so the 350 or 400 page book variety, they're still out there, but it really requires a lot of focus and discipline for people to get through that. So we're trying to be as practical and pragmatic and and to the point as we can be in pulling together some of these perspectives on leading transformational change, and that's why we went about writing this book. Yeah, brilliant.

And that sort of pracademic Praxis type space is it's a really cool space to bring in, where we try and bring it to life in an accessible way. And it was actually one of our old podcast guests, former podcast guest, Karen Joe Madden, who introduced us and brought us and brought us together. So we had a great conversation with her about culture and culture change, which is obviously a topic that we care about a lot. One of the things that we've been sort of mulling over is a question that we think people should be asking when they're going into employment now, when they're if you're entering a new organization, something that we think is a great question to ask of leaders and people looking to hire you is, how did your organization respond to and treat people during the pandemic? And so for me, that feels like such a tangible insight into a leadership ethos, into an organization's culture. It would give you such such a richness of information and making your decision around whether to work for somebody. And with that, I think we get sort of increasing awareness, from an employee's perspective, of what it means to be in an organization and how they cope with change. So those are just some of my thoughts on the visibility of change. I guess you've been out and interviewed a whole lot of people for this book and done survey work and spoken to a lot of people. What were some of the key things that came up for you in terms of the importance of change, or the key messages that they had for you? Well,

I think the single most important message that came up over and over and over again, even though people expressed it differently and the examples were different that they gave, was the importance of defining and facing reality. Human beings have this miraculous capacity to dismiss or deflect or explain away information and facts and circumstances that don't reinforce their preferred view of the internal or external environment. And turns out, you know, if you're very good at that, you do that at your peril, because there are a lot of things that are happening around us, internally and externally that we do not control, but which have enormous influence on us and our lives and our teams and our organizations. I think COVID 19 was, you know, a vivid example of this over the course of the last two plus years, but it's only one example. And so you know, many of the people we spoke with for the book, as well as my own experience in dealing with clients and people inside of organizations, when I worked in the corporate world, proves, over and over and over again, that the single most important thing you have to do, I think, in order to make transformational change happen. Question is to acknowledge the need for something to change, and you can only do that if you accept the reality that you're facing. You know, the situation is what it is. We are where we are, and you got to face into the truth. And there were all kinds of examples of that, you know over and over again, and talking to people through this book,

yeah, interesting. And our sort of cognitive biases and that ability to fall victim of our confirmation bias can make it hard for us to to really acknowledge what a current state is. And at the same time, we kind of have these micro incentives to be willfully blind about some of these things. Sometimes it's not in our interest to acknowledge a situation, because doing so might disrupt our current paths within a workplace or the diminished stuff? Yeah,

sometimes the signals are very loud and they're clear. In other cases, they're very muted. They're difficult to see or to recognize. But in either case, you have to be looking for it. I think you know that's really the one of the first things you have to be good at, is on the lookout for seeing what's going on around you. And one of the things that I learned in putting the book together was the fact that I think there's this misconception about what makes for successful transformational change in the following sense, there seems to be this point of view that if you can be anticipatory and plan for and recognize the need For Change before it's really upon you somehow that is viewed as more strategic and therefore more preferred in terms of how you lead transformational change in a successful manner. And there's plenty of examples in the book, and even more in life, of people using that anticipatory approach very successfully. So I'm not dismissing it in any way, but what I am saying is that there are many, many more examples of situations that are unplanned for unpredicted, unanticipated where people didn't really feel ready for any of it because they didn't even see it coming, frankly. And then it becomes much more a matter of, how well do you respond to it, how agile Are you? How quickly do you move? How much do you actually acknowledge reality and then act based on it? And one of my favorite quotes, that's that I put in the book, that to me, really illustrates this well, is Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxer who was being interviewed by a member of the media in anticipation of one of his heavyweight bouts. Wanted to know what the strategy was for the fight. And you know, Tyson said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And I think, you know, individuals and teams and organizations and even societies as a whole are constantly being punched in the mouth. Some are just better than others at responding to and dealing with the punch and figuring out how to recover and react. So you know, yes, anticipatory change. Changing in advance of the need is great when you can make it happen, but it only represents a portion of the kind of change we face. And what's much more likely for most of us as individuals, and I think the organizations we work in, is you get punched in the mouth, and you then very quickly have to figure out what to do about it in order to survive or thrive?

Yeah, I love that quote. That's something that we use sometimes in our work as well. So it's great to great to see it out there. If we're thinking about sort of helping our organization to navigate change, planned or unexpected change, or, I guess, anticipated or unanticipated, is there something that we can do before we even reach a point of unex or unanticipated change, to imbue some of the skills that let us be more adaptive within our working population, to do to cope with change. What are some of the things we can do, or what are some of the characteristics or skills we want our individuals to have to help them navigate more smoothly some of these unexpected changes?

I hope this doesn't sound too simplistic or obvious, but listen, listen and listen some more. You know, many people talk about the importance of communication in successfully leading change. Usually what they mean, however, when they're talking about communication is telling, telling and telling. You know, you have to explain to people the compelling need for change, and what it is that needs to change, and what I need you to do as a member of the organization to help bring about change. All of those things are extremely important, but none of them more important than starting with the most fundamental. Mental aspect of communication in my my belief and my experience, which is listening, because most of the time, the the things that you're trying to anticipate, the the act of defining reality as we were talking about it a few minutes ago, quite often, will come from places that you are not, especially if you're a leader. You know, if you're able to talk to people by listening who are closer to the customer, who are closer to the external environment, or closer to what competitors are doing, who are closer to some of the things on the edge that quite often are where big, disruptive change comes from, you have a much better chance of being able to see those things coming and anticipate what they might mean If you do a good job of actively, actively seeking input, actively seeking the truth, listening to people who are around you, in many case, they may be much more, you know, quote, unquote, Junior than you in the organization, or less experienced, but the roles they have give them clarity about stuff that's going on out there that you as the more senior leader, if you happen to be in that type of role, might not actually see or be hearing. And so, you know, for me, number one is listening and putting a lot of effort and energy into that. And even though that's not a new concept, one of the things we know is that there's still a lot of leaders and people in general who really aren't that good

at listening. We do we do some work on feedback for various things, and quite often, people will come to us and say, we'd like to, you know, get better at feedback in our organization. And one of our first questions is, well, well, how good are you at asking for and receiving feedback yourself? And we're like, oh, no, no. We don't want to do that. Then we just want to tell other people's stuff, right? Well, why don't we start with the other bit? So I think that's great as a way to start to identify signals and noise, or signals within noise. That ability to listen seems to be really key within an organization. How would you go about creating that ability to listen, to create those channels at the different levels you've spoken about so sort of at the coalface, and really giving confidence that people have a voice that is welcome. You know,

one of the I don't, I don't want to say anything critical about all the work that that organizations are doing around, you know, employee engagement surveys and pulse surveys, because there's a lot of good that's come from that, you know, and it's a very effective, in many ways, large scale listening device, but I think we've also learned at least two important things from those larger scale engagement efforts. One is, if you collect input from people and do nothing to respond to it, that generally does more damage than good causes much higher levels of frustration than if you'd never asked in the first place. So that can be really damaging. But the other thing that I find is damaging, or at least a risk, is if you as a individual, use these large scale employee engagement survey efforts as a substitute for engaging human being to human being, individual to individual, or individual to small group, or individual to large group. Because I don't think engagement surveys, even though they have value in terms of anonymity, and being able to analyze and collect data by itself gives you enough of an insight into what's frustrating people, what's getting in their way, what's working well that you want to make sure that you don't screw up, You know, along the way. So I think again, the The answer might be more simple, you know, than what most people are looking for, but I actually think it's really more about doing some of the basics well and better and more religiously, you know, on an ongoing basis, than doing things in a more fancy way that we don't actually follow through on and so I, you know, I come back to the individual, one on one or one on small group relationship that's so important in building trust, especially because if you encourage people to tell you the truth about what's going on, what's working well, what's not working well, I find that you maybe have a 51% chance of them actually telling you, and if you don't ask, you basically have a 0% chance of them telling you. And then if once they tell you, you know if people start getting killed or fired or marginalized or somehow beat up. On doesn't take very long for people throughout the organization to figure out that telling the truth and talking about what's not working really isn't all that welcome. So I think you have to listen. I think you have to go out and seek the information. But the last point I'll re emphasize is that, you know, once you hear the bad news as well as the good news, you can't beat people up or make them feel that they did something wrong for telling you what was going wrong, because that's really what you needed to hear in the first place.

Yeah, it's so hard, isn't it? This sometimes I think leaders find it hard to respond productively when they receive a piece of information like that, because it can be a bit of a visceral response. We can be take it personally, and it can be a bit of a challenge. Something that that's popped into my mind as you've been speaking is that, as a hypothesis, it feels to me that to be able to navigate change well within our teams in a larger organization, we we probably need to be able to do things like cope with failure pretty well and acknowledge that we're not great at everything, and to be able to keep delivering when we face some of these challenges and things go wrong, and it strikes me that that the ability to do those types of things and to instill in that type of culture before we face into one of these punches to the mouth might help us navigate a punch to the mouth more effectively. So if the people in our teams were used to learning, used to acknowledging they don't know their answers, used to admitting to mistakes without having those bad repercussions that you spoke about. So if we can get a culture a bit like that, we might be able to navigate change a little bit more effectively. Do you have thoughts on that, or do you have ideas on how we could create some of those mentalities within our teams? Well,

first I would say that I completely agree with what you said, because there's there's a leadership aspect to understanding and appreciating failure, there's an organizational culture aspect to it as well, in terms of, on a broader basis, you know, what does happen to people who fail, who try difficult things, who talk about things that are broken or working less well than they actually should, and making sure that those people don't get beat up, in fact, that they get appreciated for it. You know, one of the ways I think about this is actually one of the elements that came through loud and clear in the book. You know, one of the secret sauce ingredients, if you will, is this idea of love, influencers and resistors. And I mention it now because I think it speaks directly to what you were just asking James the you know, the natural tendency I think, of a leader is to, you know, seek out people who have some influence in the organization, who can help persuade other people that the change that's being asked of everyone is legitimate, needed, makes sense, is appropriate for the times, and that, of course, is totally logical. However. You know, we also can get enamored of the idea of surrounding ourselves with people who agree with us, and so we seek out people who are influential, but they also have to be people who agree with our point of view so that they can influence other people to agree with our point of view, right? That's pretty logical in a lot of ways. So we love those people, we treat them well and we seek them out. I think the flip side of the coin, however, is equally, if not more important, which is, there are people in the organization who have a lot of influence, but they are resistors. You know, by definition, they tend to be skeptics. You know, they think their job is to ask tough questions make sure that the changes that are being asked for are necessary. They make sense for the conditions that the business is facing, etc. And you know, if you make those people feel dumb or disloyal for pushing back and being skeptical, you tend to create an environment in the organization where everybody recognizes that you don't want pushback. And if you if you do that too well and too often, people will stop telling you the truth, and you'll basically drive off a cliff at 100 miles an hour and crash before you even realize that you were near the cliff. And therefore, I think as leaders, one of the most important things that we can do if we want to successfully not only lead transformational change but create a culture in the organization that embraces it is not only appreciate the need for occasional failure, where you experiment and you try things and you stretch yourself the organization sometimes it doesn't work out. What do you learn from that? But also making sure that people who are. Are pushing back, who are asking tough questions, who are being skeptical, but in the name of ensuring a better outcome, are not outcasts and people to be marginalized. They're actually people to be loved and embraced, because they'll help make your overall change effort and the approach that you're going to take better and more effective. And I learned that from the book, but I've but I've also been a firm believer of that for many years, just in my own role as a leader or as a coach or as a consultant, you can see how that yields a better outcome. Yeah, that's

brilliant. That's a lovely answer, and it it links in with your your talking point earlier about bringing together a diversity of voices, even in this book, and getting that plural voice gives us, gives us a greater richness and foundation and real understanding of where we are now from which to move forward in all kinds of domains. And as you were speaking there, I was reflecting a little bit on our topic. I'm not going to lead us down, but along sort of political divide, if voices are not heard and if people are pushed out of conversation de facto, you know, just as a result of sharing their opinions, then they can become others. And once we start to other people in our organization and divide into an us and them, it can become quite a confrontational and unhelpful place to work. Yeah, very much

so. And you know, irrespective of what any one person's politics or political views might be, I think one of the things we've learned, certainly over the last few years, is that people have a need to be heard and understood, and irrespective of what their beliefs are, if they don't feel like somebody's listening and at least acknowledging their existence and perhaps the legitimacy of their point of view, even if it's not the majority point of view, and even if it's not agreed to by other people, you run into trouble. And I think what's what's beginning to happen now in organizations, from my humble point of view is that people are now not only speaking out, but starting to lash out. I mean, you can see, you know, higher degrees of frustration, higher degrees of, you know, felt disrespect, higher degrees of almost sabotage. In certain ways. You know what's going on in organizations or societies, because people are feeling this real pressure that comes from not being valued and acknowledged. And so I'm hoping whatever political divide we might be dealing with in any one country or around the world, collectively, we learn from the experience of human beings have a need to be heard and valued and seen. And we learned that from the diversity and inclusion movement, and we ought to pay attention to it, because it's true, not only as it relates to what's going on in our companies, but it also relates, in substantial ways, to what's going on in our societies. And you can feel the pressure, and I think we've got to be mindful of and willing to acknowledge that pressure, otherwise we're not going to have people operating at their best, whether it's, you know, at home or at work.

Yeah, and it feels like in the last decade, there's been an increasing space for leaders or organizations to step into, in terms of role modeling what good behavior looks like in this sort of plural voice space. And I think as an outsider to the US observing it, I've seen organizations step more into public discourse about, you know, inclusion or multi voice and things like that, which I think is it's an interesting point to explore. One of the things that you call out in the book is, you've actually got a chapter called Don't do it. So we've talked a lot about some stuff that's, you know, it's stuff that we should do. Have you got any examples of one or two things that people should like absolutely not do if they're looking to lead some change in their organizations?

Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to use this opportunity to underscore, a couple of the things that we've just been talking about, COVID actually came out very specifically related to things that you should not do in the don't do it chapter, so to speak. You know, one is this idea of making people feel stupid, you know, or disloyal if they push back or they ask questions or they disagree, that really gets in the way. Another one that's a really big one that goes back to this topic we were talking about earlier, about defining reality is ignoring the data that doesn't reinforce, you know, your preferred view of the internal or external environment. So we've mentioned both of those already. I just wanted to reinforce them. I'll just toss in, you know, one more for for purposes of responding your to your question, one of the other areas that you really just can't or shouldn't do is confuse difference with improvement. You know, a lot of a lot of leaders, particularly when they step into a new job. Job in a new part of the organization, they have this strong need to show that things are going to be different, you know, in the US, we call that, you know, the new sheriff in town, you know. But there's an equivalent, equivalent terminology, I'm sure, in many countries and cultures. Mostly what people are trying to show is, you know, I'm here, I'm new. We're going to do things new and differently. And you know what? That's fine to a degree, but a lot of people confuse doing things differently with improvement. Just because you're doing it differently doesn't mean it's better. Doesn't mean it's improving anything. And so you could spend a lot of energy, quite frankly, wasted energy, on changing a lot of stuff without having any idea whether it made any difference at all to improving the effectiveness of the organization, or to improving the way that you're operating and dealing with customers or clients or your own employees, or trying to drive successful change. So you know, don't do it. Don't just do things differently. Also make sure you understand the baseline of what you're trying to improve, and measure and define over time whether it's actually getting better. Otherwise, you waste an awful lot of time and energy on things that don't really matter very much. They might turn out to be different than the end, but they may not be better, and in fact, they might be worse.

The area they might have a most impact on is your ego, right? Like, quite often, that's that's the case we we speak sometimes to people from sort of a movement around evidence based HR and all this kind of stuff, and this desire to measure it, and it's all there. It's so hard to just get out of a way and let your people deliver without, you know, having any action or agency yourself as a leader. It's such a hard lesson to learn that sometimes the best thing I can do is to do nothing, right, and that's so hard for people to come into that space. How do you how do you help people, particularly if they're new leaders? How do you like have that conversation about, you know, what? What should you really be doing

here? Well, one of the, one of the other ingredients in the secret sauce in the book we ended up calling go first, but not alone. And it speaks to this, you know, because you're one of the things you realize, I think, in successful, large scale change, is that, you know, the leader does matter. Not surprisingly, we expect them to be a good role model. We expect them to stand up, you know, and call for the need for substantial change and improvement. And we expect them to show the way in terms of what could be different behaviorally or or results wise. But we also have learned from putting this book together that, you know, leaders should go first, but they should not go alone. They've got to surround themselves with other people who can help get things done and drive the kind of change that is needed in the organization. I like to describe it as going in packs, you know, rather than by yourself. And pretty much all of that involves setting the tone, but then getting out of the way. So you know, leader goes first. Doesn't necessarily mean that leader always goes first. It means that leader sets the tone, establishes the need, does some role modeling for people, sets a good example, as one person said in the book, transform yourself before changing others. And that is good tone setting. But then you got to get out of the way and let people do their jobs, because in most cases, the real work is going to be done by real people with real jobs, who have real customers, clients and problems to solve. So best thing I try to often advise people I coach, for example, is to, you know, figure out where you can have the most leverage and make the most difference in driving change, and then let everybody else who works with and for you and around you do the rest, because that's really the multiplier effect. You're not going to do it on your own, no matter how smart you are or dedicated you are, and so I think you have to set the tone, but give people flexibility and freedom to try things to fail, like we were talking about. Earlier, experiment a little bit, pilot what they're doing, and then praise them when it goes well and support them when it doesn't go well, and then try again.

Yeah, that's lovely. And all too often, I think we lose sight of, as you said earlier, how simple some of the things are that are essential when it comes to effective leadership, and that role modeling, that simplicity, that being clear on what really matters, that being consistent, all those things are really key to focusing on this. And in many organizations, it is our understanding and our impression that people don't really feel they have the time to do a lot of this stuff. So particularly when you get into the middle manager. Type of level people tend to get swamped with doing and feel that they lack for space and time to step back and be intentional and mindful about how they can, you know, set the tone well, about how they can apply their leadership attention in a way that's useful. And as you were speaking there, it sort of clicked in my mind, which I guess I should have known at all when you talked about defining reality, that's one side, from an organizational perspective, but from an individual perspective, it feels to me like self awareness is really the sort of corollary for that. So as an organization, we can define what our reality is and understand our current state, but as an individual, we can sort of develop our self awareness and see what matters to us and who we are and what we are good at, where our weaker areas might be, the strengths that we have never, things that we do value. And it just feels like there's a corollary for individual transformational change and organizational transformational change in terms of that starting position. Have you got any

thoughts on that? Yes, a few, or maybe more than a few. So I'll try to be brief. First change starts with the individual. And even though data is important and the facts are important for setting the tone, we want to define reality and not ignore reality as we've been talking about. None of that really matters if you don't get to the head and heart of the person, and you know their own personal sense of you know why change matters? So I'll give you a couple of examples that came through in the book around this. First, you know, we have this section of the book that's called the beauty of and which is basically about reconciling competing priorities and mastering paradox, right? And one of the big paradoxes in the book that comes out in many, many ways, is this reconciliation of facts and feelings. So we were talking earlier about the importance of facts and data and the human limitless capacity, it seems, for ignoring the facts and data that don't confirm our preferred view. Well, that's all great, except for the fact that feelings that are native to humans, really is what will drive and accelerate change, not the facts or the circumstance. You know, one of the best examples I try to provide of this is the the age old tradition of stepping on the scale and recognizing that maybe it's time to lose some weight. You know, the numbers are staring back at you. It's incontrovertible. It's time to lose weight. Then you start thinking logically. You know, most human beings would know that's almost always going to involve some combination of diet and exercise. And so we have the facts, we even have some level of knowledge of what the steps are that we would need to take in order to lose the weight. But all of the motivation and the action for taking the step of diet and exercise and therefore losing weight is all from the inside. You know, how motivated Am I actually to exercise and to diet and to therefore lose the weight. So you get on the scale, you have the data staring you in the face. Very rarely is that data in weight loss or in large scale transformational change going to be enough to change you and your behavior and the result, if it doesn't come from the feeling of within. So that was an important lesson learned that, I think, reinforces the question that you asked. The other one that came out over and over again was, you know, I'm a firm believer that, as the lead author of this book, hopefully you're trying to teach something to people you know, who read the book and they get some benefit from it. But I'm also a firm believer that when you write a book, you should actually learn something new, right? And so for me, there were a number of aha. Because in putting this book together, one of the most important ones was this debate that goes on constantly in the world of change, which is, do people hate change or don't they right? And you know, I came to my own conclusion, you know, others can choose to agree or disagree, which is, actually yes, I think most people do hate change, however, they hate failure even more. And so if you can appeal to people's sense of wanting to win and not wanting to fail, you have a decent shot at getting them to overcome the resistance of or the hate of of change, and that comes over, comes out over and over and over again when you're trying to motivate people to do things that they don't want to do, and the self awareness that you have to have to recognize, you know you might hate and you might be resisting change, even though it's logical and needy. But you know, if you're if you're true to yourself, you might also realize that you don't want to be a failure as an individual, and you don't want to be part of a team that fails or part of an organization that fails. And therefore, are you willing to try some things to minimize the risk of failure and maximize the risk of success, even if change and what's being asked of you is personally distasteful or uncomfortable or scary, because inevitably it is. You have to be motivated by other factors that will drive you to do it anyway.

Yeah, no, that's nice. That's nice to hear. And navigating yourself to that, that sort of present, intentional space around it, I think matters when it comes to change, because all too often we we go on to our autopilot, we go on to, you know, thinking fast or thinking slow, whichever, whichever, you know, order that is, and we get lost into our routine. So disrupting our routines, in a way, is hard. It's depleting. It's It's psychologically a difficult thing to do. So that's good to remember, to bring people back into that space, I am going to slowly start to wrap us up. I've got a couple of questions that I was thinking about that that might be kind of interesting. One is to do with sort of anticipation versus response versus initiating change. So you spoke a little bit earlier about how, you know, we can anticipate change and that can look more strategic. My hypothesis is probably, in hindsight, that looks really strategic, but over time, it probably wasn't so much right, like great, you got lucky or well informed, but it's less strategic. And we think the ability to respond in the moment and be agile is an absolute, absolutely wonderful thing, and if we can develop some of those skills, then we are better able to take the punches to the mouth that we're all inevitably going to get in life as individuals and organizations. So we can really work on that ability to adapt and learn and respond, and that'll help us. But I sort of think there's probably something to touch on around, you know, stepping forward and trying to initiate our own changes, right? So so we can respond, we can adapt, or we can think of something totally new and try and initiate that change as well. And I think sometimes organizations are striving to do that a little bit, or maybe latching on to something that links into that. And I'd say things around sort of responsible business, or the ESG type space, or even things in things in the environmental space, or examples of some organizations trying to use variability as an agent to initiate change in the wider world. And I guess a question for you would be, if you were thinking about sort of initiating types of changes, are there any changes that you would like to see in the world of HR or in the way that we work, or any changes that you think would be great to start to bring in to the way that we do things.

Yes, well, first of all, you know, I'm a big believer in control your own destiny, if you can. And that's I think it's a lofty goal. I'm not sure I always do it well as a person, but I aspire to it, and I think organizations broadly need to as well. HR, likewise, I've also been a student of the whole notion of, you know, future of work and future of HR, especially over the last, you know, eight to 10 years. And if you look at what's going on with the changing nature of work, the workforce, the workplace, there's all kinds of fascinating trends that are taking place for me. You know, the places where you know, I like to see us as you know, HR professionals initiate the most change is in the following couple of areas. One is almost everything that we're being asked to do now in organizations is big, hairy, complex, multi disciplinary and cross functional in nature. So you know, whatever solutions we used to come up with that were very HR specific, cooked up by only HR people talking to other HR. People generally are going to be inadequate for where the changing nature of work is going. And so my my visual for this, if you will. The metaphor is HR as orchestra conductor. You know, if you think about an orchestra conductor, they're not an expert on playing the flute, the violin and the timpani their jobs to go find the very best musicians in the world, bring them together, create harmonious music. And I think that whole approach is where HR has been going. Needs to continue to go, and we need to accelerate it. Because literally, every big change and small change that organizations are facing really are multi disciplinary and cross functional nature, and there's really no better function or profession to orchestrate those multi disciplinary solutions than HR. So that would be one way of taking control of our own destiny and initiating what we've been talking about. The other one you alluded to a couple of times already, James, which is this whole idea of, you know, introducing analytics to to the story. It goes back to what we were talking about with the importance of data and and facts and defining reality. You know, I think there's a lot of room for judgment in the HR profession, and I certainly grew up over the last 40 years where judgment was probably more emphasized than data. And we're now going to this place where judgment is no longer out of fashion. I mean, I think it's still important, but it has to be informed judgment based on data and analytics. And what I mean by that, though, is, you know, analytics with insight. You know, I think there's a lot of organizations that pride themselves on having 35 metrics and a multi color dashboard that gets reported on weekly or monthly, and everybody looks at all this data and they have no clue what to do with it, what the insights are that they should be gleaning from it, or what are the three to five things that really would make the biggest difference to leverage change and improve performance? So I'm all for analytics and data, even more so for insights, and more so than that, I'm for action on a limited number of a handful of things that would drive the biggest positive change, and that's the place where I think we're getting hung up right now. I think there's a recognition in HR that increased emphasis on analytics and data that's important, but I think we've over rotated to collect more data, and have kind of lost sight of zero in on a few things that actually matter the most to the performance of the business and helping the business win in the marketplace. If we can get to that, I think we'll really be in great shape. Yeah, lovely.

Thank you. That was really helpful. I think in the interest of time, I'm going to wind this up before we go though, could you let people know a little bit more about where they could find the book and find out more about you and the Consortium for change as well.

Yes, appreciate you asking that question. We've actually got a one stop shop set up, which is a book specific website, which is www dot transformational change book.com and people can go there to see some summaries of the chapters, learn about the contributing authors, including myself, learn a little bit more about the Consortium for change. They can order the book at a discount through the publisher, and also, if they have interest in contacting us for presentation or further discussion about the book, all of that can be done in that one spot. And we look forward to hearing from people, anybody who's who's got an interest. We welcome them to reach out to us.

Fabulous. Well. Thank you very much in and we will be sharing a link to that page as well when we promote the podcast, so you can just follow it on there, so it's just yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you for me. Great to be with you, James. Thanks for having me.