Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!
Welcome to Essential Dynamics. I'm your host, Derek Hudson. Excited today to talk with my colleague, Dave Kane. Dave, welcome.
Dave:Thanks. I think I sort of invited myself back by by not answering the question I started the last one with. So
Derek:Well, we're we're not done yet. So Essential Dynamics podcast is, been created to explore the concepts of essential dynamics through deep conversations with interesting people, and Dave's chosen me to be the interesting person today. Turn turning the tables a little bit. So, Dave, thanks very much for the conversation we had last time. We feel like we have unfinished business.
Derek:Where do you wanna start?
Dave:Well, so last time we were talking about the sort of a blog you put up about you better build a birdhouse, which is all about, you know, getting to the action, that's gonna improve your your system and increase more value as opposed to just always planning or thinking. And we went off talking about sort of how do you know where the right place to start is. And so we kinda worked on that one last time. But the question I started out with was, why is this so hard? Why was it so hard to actually get to a point where you've identified what to do?
Dave:Now go do it, like, to implement, to succeed, to close off, those types of things. So kinda what was your thought as you were building out your birdhouse here?
Derek:So why is it so hard to actually implement a useful change to the system that increases flow? Well, there's a there's a bunch of reasons that it's hard, and each of them can, you know, take you down a little bit. One of them is that I I you know, we hear a lot about change is hard, and there's some changes that we're totally excited about. So it's not that change is hard, but this kind of change is hard because we it's hard to see. It's hard to see what we're trying to do.
Derek:In an organization, it's it's really hard to see what we're trying to do. It's hard to see the results of our work. It's hard to see the system. So much of, the work that we do is kind of knowledge work. It's less tangible.
Derek:And so I think that I think that is hard.
Dave:So I've spent a lot of time in organizations helping, you know, you build out the strategy and then, just how and so the leadership decides, you know, which we're doing first and what initiatives we're gonna do. So everybody gets very excited about it. Like you sort of say, it's it's easy to kinda get moving, and then we build a lot of time building all sorts of the metrics. And so we've we're gonna measure how this thing's gonna succeed. We're gonna track the progress, and then that's where it peters off.
Dave:So, you know, with with the right diligence, I think you can sort of measure what success is gonna look like. It just to me, that's where it the the energy kinda peters out because, you know, now somebody's gotta go do it or somehow it's gotta get done as opposed to the planning stuff. Because the planning is super easy, and and finding metrics isn't that hard. It's doing the work.
Derek:Doing the work is hard. And so what like, let's talk about for a second about what is what is doing the work. K. And so we're talking about I think about sort of the work of management, which is making decisions and, setting priorities or parameters for decisions that other people make. Right?
Derek:There's not that many decisions that we make in an organization, when it comes down to it. And we we so we complicate that a lot. And so we're not and a lot of times we don't kind of make decisions. We we try to influence, or we try to make a rule, or something like that. But a decision is like, I'm going to spend money on this.
Derek:Like, I'm gonna issue a purchase, or I'm gonna hire somebody. I'm gonna change the price. I'm gonna change the spec. Those are decisions that matter. And, you know, a lot of times in an organization, if you're implementing strategy, what you're trying to do is you're trying to get people to think differently and make different decisions kind of at their the level of their desk, their world.
Derek:And we're and we're not we're not kind of clear on that. So so we have initiative that says that we're gonna be more customer focused. And so we, I don't know, show videos and have a campaign and have t shirts and stuff like that. But where's the decision in that? Where's the change in behavior in that?
Derek:Well, it's it's someone sitting across from the customer or these days more likely on the phone or online, and acting in a different way than they did last week. And they have to understand what the purpose of that is, how it fits in. They have to feel like they're not being coerced, that there's some there's some, advantage either to them or that they wanna have an advantage to the customer. And somehow that stuff gets lost in translation, and so your your strategy is, you know, we're gonna have better, customer, you know, reviews. And the
Dave:action What what what measures gets done? So I would just stick some metrics on top of these people, and that's obviously gonna influence behavior because if I measure it, that'll change their behavior. Right? Might You know drastic way of doing it.
Derek:But You know, it it might. One of the things that we said we talked about last time is, you know, a little bit more of this, purpose, path, and people kinda conversation. So the people who are dealing with the customer have their own approach, their own style of stuff that they think is important. And, what do you know imposing a measure on them, might not have the, impact that you want it to have depending on what happened last time they had a measure imposed on them, depending on how they relate to the customer and how the company supports them in providing value to the customer. And there's a story going on in the employee's head that you change when you change a measure.
Derek:But but in, in the boardroom, you might have no idea what any of that is. And so maybe that's sometimes why this stuff is so hard is that the translation of the strategy to actually someone behaving differently, there's a there's a lot of steps in there where that can get misinterpreted.
Dave:Yeah. There's and and well, misinterpreted and just the communication isn't always, you know, in a way that's gonna make it work and that, you know, it's more of a degree or a policy or a direction or a metric. Whereas, you know, a lot of times, if you take it back up a level and have everybody understand how the system works and why each of these actions affects the system, or how it drives towards the purpose, sex, purpose, why, or or whatever the case is, then they're contributing to the system as opposed to performing a job with a metric. It's kinda how I would look at it.
Derek:So, from what you're saying then, and I would tend to agree that the ultimate place we can put an employee in, to contribute to the success of the organization is if they understand the entire system. They understand they understand what what, the system then defines as value, how customer gets the, you know, their part of that value, and what that looks like, and then they understand how they can contribute to, the flow of value. And I suppose that way back when Henry Ford was, you know, building assembly lines, that it was really important for the brake person to know the two bolts to tighten, and they didn't need to know anything else. But with the work that we have now, so complex, so intangible, and the workforce being so intelligent and having so much information available to them, you really want them to know what we're trying to do, I think. And that's and it's not that easy.
Derek:It's not that easy for a bunch of reasons. And, one of the fundamental ones is that the human tendency to deal with complexity is to divide a process into pieces. And and we we don't like we don't like to think about too much stuff. And so we'll say, well, the the process is we sell, and then we engineer, and then we manufacture. So let's have a sales department and an engineering department and a manufacturing department.
Derek:Well, I've been an organization that had exactly those things, and all of the problems were the interface between the sales and the engineering and the engineering and the manufacturing.
Dave:Right. Well, because things are not linear anymore. No. There there isn't that sort of it it's just that simple of it slides down that conveyor belt and everybody adds their piece.
Derek:No. It's, it is like yeah. There's, iterative, recursive calculations. There's all kinds of ambiguity. And so we we need to understand, you know, as a minimum, what the, you know, workstation upstream from you, what their world is like, and what the one downstream from you, what their world is like.
Derek:But if you take that to any extension, you need to understand how the system flows, what your what your part is, but you can't be limited to that because, you know, smart people can say, hey, just a second here. I just found out that, you know, four steps upstream for me, they're putting this thing on, and my main job is to take it off. And so let's get together and figure out, you know, do we need this component or not? And it's like so I think it's it starts as soon as a CEO says you're in charge of engineering and you're in charge of sales. Now k.
Derek:So that's there's no easy alternatives to that, but that's where it starts.
Dave:And and sort of that that piece of identification of you're in charge of this, that I mean, because a lot of what we just sort of talked about applies both to change, but also just to the effective organization and and just sort of that continuous improvement, and everybody sees their piece. But take that piece of it helps when somebody's identified as having accountability or responsibility and bringing that back to, this building the birdhouse of of taking it from, you know, a good idea to do to actually getting something done. So how does that assignment of accountability or the individual role help within this conversation of, you know, getting the project moving and completed?
Derek:Alright. So that's an interesting one because, usually accountability is I mean, I I've heard it said this way. I don't like the expression, but it's it makes it makes it clear what we're talking about. Accountability, oh, that's which throat to choke. And I've heard that expression from, from, you know, from more than one person, people that I, otherwise admire.
Derek:You know, blame is not a great motivator. And accountability, you know, there's I guess there's different kinds of accountability. I like to think about the the term stewardship, which I I think the definition I use is something like careful management of something and we can have collective stewardship over things. So sometimes it's good to have the chair of a meeting, and sometimes it's good to have someone sign off and say, we can do this, we can't do that. But for the most part, if we're trying to protect our own space, what accountability means is I'm not accountable for that.
Derek:You can't the system can fall apart, but if I did my part, you can't blame me. So that's not that's not productive accountability in my mind. Initiative, accountability, having the ability to say, hey, just a second, guys. This is not good enough. We need to do better.
Derek:That's something that people, I think, step into more than they get, you know, placed on them. And
Dave:Okay. So we've we've redefined the the terms within the RACI here Mhmm. And then sort of mixed up
Derek:Mixed them up, Stuart.
Dave:For accountability and responsibility is still out there. But how is that I mean, it's still in the necessary part in order to make, to take this this building a birdhouse of somebody's actually gotta start taking the plans and building the house. And so you're sort of saying when somebody takes on that role of of, stewarding it or, you know, making sure things are moving along as planned, that that's still sort of that necessary first step of it's not gonna move along as quickly if it's just a general thing that everybody's kinda working on.
Derek:Yeah. No. That's that's fair. So I have, I've grown up in project organizations. And when I first encountered a functional organization, you know, thirteen years into my career, I couldn't figure out why people didn't think project all the time.
Derek:And then I realized that I had you know, I mean, my first experience working after university was an audit, and an audit is a project. And the team disassembles at the end, and a new team reforms, and I have a new boss for a month, and then I have a different boss after that. And, so I understood that this, you know, this project mentality more than some. So if you wanna build a birdhouse in an organization, you need the view of engineering and the view of manufacturing. Yeah.
Derek:You can still have a project manager, but don't bury it in the silos of of the departments. It needs to be it's still you still need to rise up above that and see the system view, and then, yeah, you can have, you know, people people with responsibility and authority to get stuff done. But, you know, if you wanna make a change to the overall system, it needs to be at that system level. And if if you say, well, we need to do better, and all the VPs say, I'll I'll do my part, when and take it back to their team, that's not you're not realizing the potential that you can if you look at it from a from a system level. So I think we're beating this one Mhmm.
Derek:Down pretty hard, but it it is a structural thing that we impose on the world that doesn't have to be that way. And and, like, there's a lot of things that are hard because, you know, the world's a complex place and there's risk and stuff like that, but but organizational silos are one thing that, you know, we create that we don't we don't have to create.
Dave:Right. We create because it it's we work within just because it's often either preexisting or it just it's just seems easier of where you take this back and work on it.
Derek:Yeah. And, and let's divide it up into pieces and then the pieces report back. And so, but there's this, there's a system view that's, that's, that's harder to get to. So that, so that's, that's one reason that it's hard. I'm gonna maybe personalize it and try another reason that that stuff is hard.
Derek:And that is that each of us have our own kind of perception of things, and we work in our own world. And we tend to get pulled into details whether, you know, we wanna talk about that in the business or whatever. And those deadlines and that reality of having to actually make the value move through, is really important. It's all it's the urgent stuff, and it's hard to step back from that and look at how we do it. It's hard to do that on our own selves, on our own teams, and for our organization.
Derek:And so anytime you've got a high performing system that's cranking out, you know, value, it's hard to to take any time away from that, even if that's to, look at a better way of creating that value. So just kinda being pulled in is, I think, makes those things inherently hard.
Dave:Okay. So I think we've sort of gone through and and realized it's it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be hard to to sort of, get the birdhouse going and to follow it through, and staying at the systems level is certainly gonna be helpful to that. Why don't we spend a bit of time sort of talking about how to make this work then? How do you take it and be more efficient at it, or sort of what are your experiences working with organizations?
Dave:Or even if there's a company that's done this really well, what did you learn from them about trying to keep this thing moving forward?
Derek:Well, like like I said, it's really natural to break systems down. So so that's a problem that we have, and it's also natural for us to expect and kind of enjoy complexity. And so we manage complex one of the ways we manage complexity is by taking the system apart. So let's not do that this time. And that's why we keep using the this idea in essential dynamics of keeping things very simple with a purpose path to get there, the processes and systems, and then the people who do it.
Derek:That's those are the only elements that we have to work with. So I I'm thinking of an organization, disguise a little bit, but there was a lot of chaos in the organization. There were a lot of good ideas bouncing around, and there was, the organization was divided into business units and functional areas, And so there's a lot of sort of sub optimization of these things and and not a lot of perspective at the top level. So we start talking about the basic principles that we espouse in essential dynamics. And one of the things that they just latched onto, and it it's in their in their internal material now is we are a two purpose organization.
Derek:We exist to serve the customer this way, and when we do, the customer's life is better. They they get immediate, payback that improves their life and their family. That's you know, in the world that they worked in, that's actually what happened. And if we do that properly, we create value for our investors.
Dave:Right. So you do your purpose x, purpose y.
Derek:So they got purpose x, purpose y. They said, we are a two purpose organization. What do we have to do to maximize both of those? And this little team realized that they had a common asset which was used to generate this value, and then different markets in which they served it, which were all chopped up. And they started to talk about the big picture of how do we get more flow of this value to customers?
Derek:How do we make it better? And immediately, all kinds of things came to mind. And they didn't need to hire a consultant to do their own thinking for them. They just needed to kinda pose the question at the right level and have the right people talking about it. And they were immediately able to further integrate the organization around that purpose.
Derek:Now they use a lot of metrics. So, you know, they they you know, from outside, you might say, well, they did the stuff that everyone tries to do, but there was a mindset switch in there where they got united around these, these common purposes, where they saw every part of the organization can contribute to, and they didn't compete with each other. And that was maybe a bit of a revelation to them. So, so as an example, I would say the simple answer, what we talk about sometimes is the simplicity on the other side of complexity. If it resonates with the people, then the rest of it isn't as hard.
Dave:Resonates with the people, the rest of
Derek:it isn't hard. Okay.
Dave:And it also sounds like, though, once they started creating these ideas, it wasn't some long extended plan with 16 parts to it. If if it resonates with the people, it's to me, it sounds like it's small bites.
Derek:Well, it's small bites and it's fast because, you know, if we talk about in the early conversation we were talking about, we're just really trying to get people to make different decisions in the moment. And, you know, maybe you can incent them to do that, but if they understand that there's a way that's gonna be better, you can you can have like instantaneous change. And it doesn't that hard. So you you picked up on it, that word resonance. One of the one of the things I describe about sort of the people side sometimes is that what we're trying to do is, earn the hearts and minds of the people.
Derek:And you don't earn it by paying them or having a nice lunchroom. You could, you could actually lose it if those things are substandard, but the way you earn it is a resonance with the purpose and a resonance with the way you work together.
Dave:Yeah. And I think I mean, so often, like you sort of say, in organizations, quite often, we take complex things and we throw it into the silo because it's just it's easier for us to deal with. I think quite often with the purpose path in people, when I'm having discussions with people, they like to keep it in one of those three silos, and let's have a discussion about people with people. But what I'm kinda hearing with what you're saying is if you wanna be winning, say, the hearts and minds of the individual within the people side of of purpose, path, and people, the conversation has to go back to, well, here's the path and and the way we're doing it, but more importantly, here's the purposes and and making sure it's all interconnected. And so it's it's an incredibly complex way of looking at it, but it sort of needs to be done.
Dave:And so I think that's kinda to me that key piece of if you wanna make these things move forward, everything has to kinda be interconnected.
Derek:Yes. Yes. Dave, that's right. And so that's why we we came up with this simple model of essential dynamics because it's it can be complex, but it's actually, at the top level, very, very simple. And we don't get that in the way we talk about organizations that, yes, the the people side is always there.
Derek:And the way to connect the people with the task at hand is the purpose. And if we can if we can get that, we get the system does create its own energy, and we're not
Dave:Yeah. And that ties it back to the first question of, you know, why is it so hard to build the birdhouse? And and if you can get that that energy and that interconnectedness, it's not hard. And it it's sort of each piece contributes its part, but it sort of builds upon itself.
Derek:Well, that's right. And so maybe another reason, let's close it off with that, for the birdhouse metaphor, is it all comes together. And then we have the birdhouse. So birdhouse represents clear purpose, processes that get you there, and people that are invested in the purpose and the processes to get you there. Then you have a birdhouse.
Derek:Other if you don't do all of that, then you've got, a sketch or a mock up or something like that, but you didn't build a birdhouse.
Dave:Oh, that's an excellent excellent way to sum it all up. So I'm I'm gonna leave my, my questions there.
Derek:Okay. Well, thanks very much, Dave, for that interesting conversation. Dave Kane and I are both with Unconstrained. Brynn Griffiths is, in the background doing doing us right. And, to all our listeners, consider your
Dave:quest.