You Have to See It to Improve It

Leaders cannot improve a system while they are inside it. You have to step out to see it, and you have to see it to improve it. Drawing from backpacking, missionary service, church leadership, and business experience, Derek shows why hard things become meaningful when they are part of a quest. The invitation is simple: step back, get guidance, use a clear framework, and learn to see what is really going on.

Derek is at Unconstrained.

Full show notes on the Essential Dynamics wiki.

What is Essential Dynamics with Derek Hudson?

Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!

I'm really excited to do this, and thanks, Lawrence, for the opportunity. I have today as I'm thinking about this, two really important worlds in my life have come together. There's church associations and people that I love working together with at church. And there's my work associations in the Venn diagram. The circles are almost overlapped.

So, I really feel the interest in the energy that can come out of people with common interests. And so what I want to do today is just take a few minutes to share some of the things that I've learned through The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that apply to the way we can lead and run organizations and get things done with groups of people. And I hope that it's helpful to you. I'm gonna share one principle as an example, but there's lots more and we can continue conversation in a bunch of different ways.

I would like to thank Jayson also. Or I'd like to thank Jayson Roofing for sponsoring this. And I'd like to thank Lawrence for being on my podcast the last two episodes. So, if you don't get enough of Lawrence, you can just dial up Essential Dynamics and be able to listen to that conversation. I developed this idea of Essential Dynamics at the beginning of COVID. And one of the things that I noted was that as the bad news kept crashing in, it seemed like people were upset or outraged that things were going to be hard. That they're going to have to have some restrictions and it was unfair and life shouldn't be like that.

And as I thought about that, I thought, well, actually I've had a lot of experiences that have been hard that have been good for me. How do we think about hard things in a way that's way more productive than that? And I came up with the idea that, you know, quests are hard. The epic quest is only something interesting because it's so hard to achieve the objective. That was the foundation of this idea of essential dynamics. I'll talk a little bit about that later, but what
I do want to talk about now is some experiences that I had that kind of formed some of this.

So, the first real epic quest that I went on, I was 12 years old and one of my first young men's camp. And it was epic. We were led by two great leaders, and most of you will know them. Our Deacons Quorum advisor and Scoutmaster was Ron Patrick. And our mountain guide was a new member of the church named Gary Peterson. And they took us deep in the backcountry in Jasper.

You gotta understand, we had 1970s equipment. When you're in your tent and it rained, you got wet. If you wanted something warm to eat, you cooked over the fire.

And so we were mostly, I think, tired and uncomfortable. I was this tall. I weighed seventy-five pounds. I had the worst backpack imaginable. Had this big pot that since we cooked over the fire made everything black in my pack and all my clothes and stuff like that.

I don't remember anything other than the good times. It was an awesome experience. Was with the young men that I would then grow up with until we were married. Was the group. I found out that I could do hard things. I found out that I like challenge, that I liked adventure, that I liked being outside. It was a life changing moment for me.

And as a result of that, every year after that, when our leaders said, “What do want to do for young men's camp?” I said, “We gotta go to the mountains.” And mostly we did. When I was 18 years old, in university, before my mission, I grabbed three of my friends, and without any other help or adult supervision, we went to Mount Assiniboine. We had a great epic experience, all kinds of unexpected stuff.

The next time I led backpack or yeah, next time I led a backpacking trip, I was in that young men's presidency with Glenn Roberts. I had two younger friends as the other leaders, and I was the leader at 22 years old. And I haven't stopped backpacking. Last summer, I did an epic trip in the mountains with a couple of guys in their 70s, which is the first time I've done that. And no, I'm not 70.

That was a life changing experience for me that started just with the way the church ran the Aaronic Priesthood program. Was awesome.

My second experience I want to share was not so awesome. That was on my mission. Halfway through my mission, I was in Seoul, Korea, was taken in the mission president's office, given a letter by Spencer W. Kimball, reassigning me from the Korea Soul Mission to the Illinois Chicago North Mission to work with the tiny Korean branch. And within days, I was in a basement apartment in Koreatown in Chicago. The branch was dysfunctional. There were four members the first Sunday I went. Two of them were the branch president and his wife, But I never saw the branch president's wife again. She left him and the church. I'm pretty sure it wasn't my fault, but I never saw her again.

And we had we had a really hard time. Talked to our mission president and said, “What do we do?” And he said, “These are you your people. You figure it out.”

That was the loneliest, hardest time that I think I've ever had. I got there at the beginning or at the end of the fall, so went through the winter months. Korean people were different in Chicago than they were in Korea. Korea, we talked to everybody. In Chicago, they're all working two jobs. It was really challenging. And what did I find out? Well, I already learned this one. I can do hard things, but then I also found out that I can do hard things for a long time. I can just keep doing hard things.

I also found out that I wasn't alone and that for the first time in my life, the only option I had was to get divine help to solve this challenge that we had. My companion and I, the one that I had most of the time, didn't ever really become the best of friends. We ended up with mutual respect, which I thought was a huge victory, but it was hard.

It was really hard. And that was a life defining experience for me that happened over the course of eleven months.

The third thing I want to share isn't one experience, but it's what happened to me after I finished university. Newly married, started working at an accounting firm, got through the chartered accountant program, and then I was a young professional in a big firm. During all that time, even though I helped clients with all kinds of interesting things, I did not hold a leadership position. I was there twelve years. I never had a direct report. I was never on the leadership team. I was never part of strategy of the firm, which was an international firm.

But at the same time, I had this laboratory of leadership in the church. I was executive secretary to a great bishop, Mike Miller. Right after that, was executive secretary to a great state president, Bob White. I learned from him and Darryl Acroyd and Mel Wong as counselors. I had opportunity to see leadership in action.

And later on I had other callings which. Introduced me to more and more principles and opportunities. One of the things that happened at that young age is that I was the stake mission president. That used to be a thing. And so I was responsible to supervise the ward mission leaders and 70 ward missionaries. So when left Price Waterhouse and got a job as a chief financial officer, I'd had running large divisions of people. I'd just never been paid for it before. And so I had developed this experience, and transferred it to work.

There's one experience that I remember that really stands out. I was serving as a young bishop. Then I had a counselor that moved to a different city and was then called as a bishop. And he had to call me on a bishop matter at some point. So I pick up the phone in the office and I'm talking with him and he says, “Hey, are your counselors there?” And I said, “Yeah.”

He says, “Well, put them on. So we put on speakerphone and then my former counselor, this new bishop said, “I’ve got a message for you. Pay attention.”

And I think that's what I did through that time as an executive secretary and all the other experiences that I had. I was always paying attention. I was always trying to figure out how does this work? What can I learn at church that I can use at work?

And what can I learn at work that I can use at church? Because I believe that truth is truth. And true principles are true principles, and they work. They can work wherever you need them.

So let me just share one principle that I've learned that I think we do really well at church and is not something that you see enough of at work. You can think of this as if you're a leader of an organization, but in any situation, I think this principle is very powerful.

So I'm going to start with this example. Many, many times in the scriptures, an individual is called to go to the top of the mountain. And they go up on top of the mountain, and they have this revelatory experience. Sometimes they see God or there's an angel. I think I think of Moses because we've been reading that recently. So Moses gets called to the mountain, and he talks to God face to face.

And what does God tell him? Well, the first thing God does is He shows him the vast expanse of His creations. And He says, these are the worlds, these are the people, these are my works, this is what I've done.

And then he shares with Moses, this is my plan. This is what I'm here to do. I'm here to work for the immortality and eternal life of my children.

And the third thing he does is he calls Moses to the work. He says, “I have a work for you.” Or if you watch the movie, “Set my people free.”

So, Moses has this amazing experience. Abraham, the brother of Jared, Nephi, Joseph Smith.Joseph Smith goes into a grove of trees. Christ goes into the Judean wilderness. They all get away from the world and then have these experiences. So that those are profound scriptural experiences and and some of them are are described as being so very unique.

But they're not that unique, and that experience is available to all of us because we can go to the mountain of the Lord's house. When we go to the mountain of the Lord's house, we can have the same experience. In the temple, we're shown the expanse of the Lord's creations. We're shown his plan for his children, and we're called to the work. We're called to work to build the kingdom. And then when we leave the temple, we leave endowed with power so that we can do the work. So those two are really the same experience. If you wanna think about it, Moses and Abraham received their temple endowment on top of a mountain, and we go to a temple wonderfully near us. It's right here in our community.

Now the third example I have is not anywhere near the same, but I think it teaches the same principle. And that is in the church throughout the world, all local operations of the church organized into wards gathered into stakes. And in the ward, the work gets done. Gospel is taught. People are administered to. The poor are helped. New members are welcome. We build a community of saints. We teach our children and our youth the gospel all in the ward.

Ward work is front line. It's intense. It comes at you. No bishop ever has to sit down and say, what am I gonna do today or this week? It just comes at you, and it's, sometimes overwhelming. But that's where the real work is.

But wards are gathered into stakes. Why do we have stakes? Stakes are there to help the wards do the work. So, the stake can teach the ward. The stake can help the the leaders of the ward step back and get a vision of what they're really trying to do, and understand their purpose and get the tools and the resources they need to do the work.

The ward is in the business, and the stake is on the business. And the really cool thing about that is it doesn't matter who's in what position. It's the organization and the responsibility that sets that.

I had this really interesting opportunity when I was, released as bishop and called into a stake presidency. Darryl Rolfson succeeded me as bishop. So whenever I went to my ward and I'm in the stake presidency and he's the bishop and we sit together on the stand, my job is to kind of help him sit back and see how things are going and help him out. I represent the stake president when I do that.

Well, ten or twelve years later, Darryl Rolfson is in the stake presidency, and I'm a bishop again. And so when we get to church and we sit together, we've traded seats. It's not like he's more experienced or I'm smarter. It's there's a role for the ward and there's a role for the stake.

And when we do that right, the church can grow throughout all the world and not get more complicated. It's the most scalable system ever.

I've looked for it in the business world and there's nothing like it. It's inspired. So all these three things teach one principle, and that is you can't see the system from inside the system. You have to step out of the system to see it, and you have to see it to be able to improve it. Now, as you think about what do the prophets do in this situation?

They go to the mountains and then they see something. They're given a vision of something. They become a ”see-er”. They're a seer.

I call it system sight. And so if you want to improve a system, you have to be able to see it. And so I have three ideas. This is the practical part of what you can do in an organization or as a business leader in any of your responsibilities to get systems tight.

And the first thing is to actively step out and try and see the system. To consciously do that. Whether it's time or space or agenda or activity, somehow you have to step away and say, “Okay, now what are we looking at here? What's actually going on?” That's the first thing.

The second thing is that you need to have a conversation with someone who's outside the system. I refer to that role as a guide. Remember I said that Gary Peterson was our mountain guide? If you want to climb a mountain, you don't take a coach. You don't hire a consultant or a trainer. You want to take a guide. If you hire a guide to climb a mountain, who climbs the mountain? Well, you do, but you’ve got the guide.

And so that's the practice that I do in my business - I'm trying to be the guide, help people get to the top of the mountain, and help people see what's going on.

The third thing is, is you need some kind of a way of thinking about a system that's separate from your business. Something that's simple, that's easy to understand, that you can communicate with. That's what Essential Dynamics is.

That's what I'm trying to create there, is a way to talk about complex systems in a way where we can get right to the core of it, right to the things that we need to fix that are going to make a difference.

Now in the church, we have that. Lawrence mentioned that we work with young service missionaries. Part of the young service missionaries’ purpose is to “live as examples of faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, covenant keeping with God, and enduring to the end.”

That's the Doctrine of Christ. That's the covenant path. That's the pattern we see over and over and over again. That's a framework that we can use in any activities of our church to understand what we're trying to do.

Essential dynamics and other frameworks like that are tools where we can do the same thing in our organizations and step back and say, “Okay, well, what's the purpose and what's the path? How do we accomplish that purpose and what's getting in the way and what's moving us forward?”

And that's why we have Essential Dynamics and other things like that is so that when you step back and see the system, and in a conversation with the guide, you can get right to the key issues. So, I wanted to share that with you today. I thought it would be helpful.

As I close, I just want to invoke the prayer that you hear in youth Sunday School all the time, which is “Please bless us that we'll be able to take the things that we learned today and use them in our daily lives.”

Consider your quest.

Thank you. Thank you.