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 podcast. I'm Derek Hudson. I'm the founder of the Essential Dynamics podcast. Today, I'm excited to have my colleague, Dave Kame. This is me, Dave.
Derek:How are you?
Dave:I'm I'm doing really well, Derek. Thanks for, bringing me back here.
Derek:Oh, it's it's it's good to be good to have you back. The Essential Dynamics podcast, we talk about the concepts that we've been developing in the Essential Dynamics framework, which helps us understand how systems work, particularly business systems, and help people and and organizations improve their performance. Dave has, got excellent questions, excellent ideas, and so we wanna just have this as a conversation as we explore some topics that we've alluded to but haven't really got into yet. So, Dave, what's on your mind today?
Dave:Well, I think so far through this season, you spent sort of a lot of time talking about, you know, those, the business staples through the business things that we hang on to and and we need to just stop doing. And the one that sort of occurred to me over the last few podcasts I've been listening to is that idea of low hanging fruit and that companies, you know, you just need to get out there and start knocking off a low hanging fruit, and that's gonna create value for you. And and it just that doesn't hold together for me, so I was I was kinda hoping to explore that one for a bit.
Derek:So low hanging fruit, what do you what do you think we mean when, people say you just have to go looking for the low hanging fruit?
Dave:I think it's just this, this idea out there that there's these quick solutions to these easily solved problems, and any problem you can solve is gonna increase value, Right? So the more of these problems you solve, the more more value is gonna be flowing through your system. And, I I just I think it's a bit of an illusion, but, I don't know. I was gonna try and explore with you within the sort of the the essential dynamics way of looking at things.
Derek:Sure. Well, let me go back to my early consulting days when I was with a with a big four, professional services firm. And from time to time, that phrase came up, and I think the idea was, we're trying to convince the client to undertake some kind of change initiative, and they're nervous about it. And so we think, well, if we can if we can, do some easy stuff, and show that the easy stuff has an impact, then, you know, we can, we can kinda get in and get started.
Dave:It builds momentum, builds credibility. Everybody wants to just sort of get the ball rolling. Right?
Derek:Yeah. Yeah. So but there I have huge problems with it too. And so we've talked about it in, in different contexts. And we've we've had some a number of conversations about being stuck.
Derek:And one of the ways we say that you naturally can get stuck in an organization is you solve all the easy problems. And as you do that, your organization builds in size and complexity, and the problems get harder and harder until you bump up against one you don't know how to solve, and then you get stuck. So
Dave:if
Derek:you're in that mode, and instead of wanting to deal with the hard problem, you go around looking for easy problems. Well, the first thing is it's not gonna get you unstuck. So what actually are you doing? So there's there's something to that, which is it's it's not the right problem to solve. Mhmm.
Derek:And another thing would be, well, haven't haven't hasn't everyone already harvested the low hanging fruit? Like, that's kinda by definition the first stuff that's gonna go. So what kind of an organization has not even done that?
Dave:Well, yeah. And and to me, a lot of times, the easy stuff is is just a bit of that distraction. Right? It's it diverts attention away from there's probably some more important issue out there that you're better off putting the time and energy towards rather than two or three of the easy ones. Because like you say, if you've done them, you've gotten to a point where you've ex there's probably a a more serious constraint out there that you need to start looking at.
Dave:So it's just that bit of a distraction. It's a bit of, a diversion of of resources better placed elsewhere.
Derek:Well and and I'll put a put a link in here, but one of the other concepts that we talk about is the idea that management attention is limited. You only have so much capacity at the top of an organization to decide what to focus on and put energy in things. So if you're putting energy in easy problems, that's that much more capacity that you don't have to deal with the tricky problems. So so I guess we'll probably include the, the concept that we've had in the title for some of our episodes, business traditions that have to stop now, colon, you know, finding low hanging fruit. So we've kind of established that in this early days, though.
Derek:We don't think that's great. Let's just, let's just beat let's just beat it down a little bit more, though. What what are what are all the problems with chasing low hanging fruit? So we talked about distraction as well.
Dave:Distraction. And Yeah. I think one of the other ones in my mind and it's not always a bad thing, but there's this illusion of progress. Right? There's this this false sense that you're making progress.
Dave:And in a lot of organizations, sometimes you need that because of outside reasons, your stakeholders are demanding it or, you know, that it just you you need to, like, build that momentum like we're talking about. But and a lot of times it just gives everybody in the company this, this idea that we're doing stuff, and that's a good thing, and we're moving stuff along. But we're not, we're not increasing the value, but there's this illusion that if everybody's busy and everybody's working on it, we're going to end up getting gains. And unfortunately, if you're not focused on the right thing, and you're focused on these easy things, you're going to get to the end of the year, look at all the stuff you achieved, but the cycle isn't any different. You're not you're not generating any greater value.
Dave:So it's, kind of to sort of look of art, you're you're you're looking you're you're just fooling yourself a little bit.
Derek:Well, well, there's some, yeah, self deception going on
Dave:That's it, yeah.
Derek:About progress. So let's talk about that for a second. If you have clarity on what the purpose of the organization is, Purpose is one of the key one of the essential elements of essential dynamics. If you're clear on the purpose and you're clear on the path, which is second essential element, like you know the steps that you need to take to accomplish the purpose, then it's easier to look at a proposed initiative and to say, how does that help us accomplish our purpose? And if you can't if you can't point to, increased creation of value, then, you may you might then not be as tempted to, pursue these these easy outs, in the in the quest for looking like you're making progress.
Derek:If you know what real progress is, the illusion of progress can't stand up.
Dave:Right. Yep. And I think that's that's just a great easy first screen, right, is is measured against your your purpose like that. And then the second one, if you wanna dive a little deeper on it, is you start looking at, you know, your flow and and understanding what are the key constraints and if if this is actually gonna make the difference to to improving the flow. Right?
Dave:So you can kinda go through your granularity of of of examination to figure out, is is this easy when the right when? So because I think that that kinda leads me to a different thought of I always like going back to the flow of of what's going through the pipe and what's being constrained and stuff, and my worry with some of the low hanging fruit is just that unintended consequences, right? So, take it to so many other even just projects outside of business. I remember even a few years ago I was helping some people put in a water line out of the lake and you're just putting a pump into the water. And I probably spent about twenty minutes messing around with a little foot valve, which is at the end that keeps the pressure in the hose and the water.
Dave:And it wasn't it was the easy thing because it was right in front of me. And I thought, well, this is obviously the problem of why things aren't working. And it had nothing to do with the problem, but, I thought it was an easy fix. I spent half an hour doing it and then ended up having to undo it later on. And I kinda see that with some of the low hanging fruit is there's unintended consequence of if you're not fixing the right thing, you may end up having to come undo that, or you may have to come and change something because what you've done has made the constraint worse.
Derek:Well, I'd I'd love for us, like, on the spot here very quickly to think of some examples of unintended unintended consequences. And I've I've got one. I'm not sure it works really well, but when I was at Microline, we had a dynamic environment. We, hired a bunch of people quickly. We had, we're still an organization that was sort of forming its culture and its processes and stuff like that.
Derek:Very interested in having employees really involved. And, at some point, I was approached by a university student, to ask if we would participate in an employee survey project that they would administer. So there's no cost to us, and this team of students would come in. They would craft the questions, send out the questions, get the responses, compile them, and report back. And we didn't it didn't cost us any money and very little time.
Derek:And then we would get feedback from our employees. So we did that. I did have some I did have some worries about it, but we did it. And, here's the thing about employee surveys. As soon as you ask the questions, you change the environment.
Derek:And so now we have, expectations for employees that that weren't there before. Not just weren't stated, weren't there. And now these new expectations from employees have been created, and now people want this, that, or whatever, for their, for their work life balance or for their, engagement at work or training, you know, for future career opportunities, all this stuff. They were fine before, and after the survey, now they wanna know what we're gonna do about this stuff. And so then we had to have a meeting with everyone and talk about our real priorities for the organization and where this stuff would fit in them.
Derek:And that was a lot of time that we didn't need to spend because they were actually fine before, and they were fine after we worked our way through it. But in the moment, the survey created a change in the environment, and the only change that we saw was not positive, at least initially. I I
Dave:as you said,
Derek:I've got a few Yeah.
Dave:Well, I don't I don't know. I do it keep going off on on on the pulse check surveys and stuff. And, the the other example I can think of was was working with a a retail organization, and the the main part of the flow was the more people you got in the door to sort of sample the product, the higher chance sales. Because once they they tasted it, they they loved it and they bought it because it was, they were making things. And, you know, the the low hanging fruit for everybody within the organization was, the system or the the software system and and the way you track sales and process them.
Dave:And I think, we spent about a year, you know, trying to figure out the exact system to bring in there and spent tons of time and money, and we changed how we interacted with the customer to put in the system, but we did increase the number of people coming in the door tasting it and choosing to buy. And so, but by focusing on this one piece, what we did though is we did change how the customer interaction went for the people who did get in the door. And for a little while there, we actually saw a bit of a a reduction in in how many people who came through the door consumed. And so because everybody jumps to the system as being, well, not necessarily the the the easy solution because it was a nightmare, but it was low hanging and obvious to everybody. It started affecting the important parts in getting the commitment to sale without sort of realizing we've just done a bit of damage to the thing we should have been fixing in the first place.
Derek:So that's really interesting. Maybe we can broaden our understanding of what low hanging fruit might mean. It it could be in maybe a couple of categories. One would be it's something that could be easily fixed. Yep.
Derek:And, another thing might be, it's something that's an obvious target. Not necessarily easy easily fixed.
Dave:Right. It's just it's it's the go to, because it's well, there's a lot of help out there. There's a lot of people suggesting that's the one you should go fix, and it's just it's easier to find information. It's easier to to come up with the solution or the person to come take it for you.
Derek:Right. So so we need a database. I don't know how many times I've heard that in my career. Yep. Like, we need a database.
Derek:And so you'll find someone who will take your, substandard data and, put it in a form that you can manipulate it. But as you say, maybe make the customer experience worse, certainly not make it better, and certainly not change the fundamentals of the process. And so the low hanging fruit in that point was we didn't have to spend a lot of time because we know better data. Like, we have bad data, so let's get better data. Not necessarily easy to do.
Derek:You just spend a lot of money. Ultimately, no, no positive impact. I really wonder right now, if, that thing in our world is adopting artificial intelligence in your organization. It's not easy, but you could say, well, it's 2024, we need an AI strategy in our organization. And I don't know if that's not distraction and illusion of progress in most cases.
Dave:Yep. Yeah. That one, and I think the one we've used in the past is, you know, going digital and and taking a digital grant and stuff to to go pursue building out your your web presence, which may or may not help you. And I think sort of that low hanging fruit idea is either it's the very easy one to do, so you can take a bunch of things off off the list, or it's just a very easy one to land on. It's the obvious, it's the one everybody else is doing, it's, you know, you're not going to spend the time to examine your hypothesis to figure out is it the right thing to fix?
Dave:It's just, but it's an easy answer to get to. Let's just go with that one.
Derek:Well, let's talk about that for a minute. You're not you said you're not gonna take time to examine your hypothesis. Like, why wouldn't organizations wanna get it right? Why would why do they wanna jump to solutions?
Dave:Well, I think well, there's always this well, not always, but there's often this this pressure to be doing something, to to be moving towards it. But a lot of organizations don't have that understanding of their system. They don't have that that sort of that value creation system mapped out. So, any improvement is a good improvement. And so it's just it moves there a bit faster.
Dave:And it's not to say that isn't all you know, there aren't instances where doing something is better than doing nothing. You know, if you're in early days where there are a lot of easy problems before you get to them or a new venture or there's political pressures on why you need to do it. But, you know, in other organizations, as you get to the more challenging ones and you see your value creation system, it's a hypothesis, and you do need to do tests every so often. You do need to just try to fix something to see how the other pieces interact. But at least then you're doing that interaction knowing you're testing the hypothesis and you're looking for how it affected everything else.
Dave:You're not just, oh, we need to go fix that, and then we're gonna go on to the next thing.
Derek:So so I I know you wanna talk about this, so let's go back to when this low hanging fruit idea might help. And I I just have a story. I I I told you that I'd I'd relate it. I'll I'll disguise the, the client a little bit, but I I worked with an organization, that see, this was like twenty five years ago, seemed like it was frozen in time twenty five years before that. And the, this there was it was a bit of a family business, couple of families involved, I think.
Derek:So the senior people were probably in their seventies. Nothing had changed for a long time. They did need better computer systems, but they also needed to understand their business and, and line up the way they worked with what actually was happening in the business. As we interviewed people, we just heard about how bad it was about bad morale, bad process, bad customer service, bad leadership, all this stuff. It was quite depressing.
Derek:And in in one conversation, someone asked me, how can you do this all day? Just sit here and listen to people complain. And, and I joked, and I said, well, I, I go for a run after work, and then I have a shower, and then I'm fine. But, of course, the reason that I could do it is because all the time, my mind is scheming on how do we how do we break this bog jam? How do we move forward?
Derek:And so I asked people what what, changes they wanted to see, and they had some, you know, really good, you know, structural changes, but some other things that kept coming up. And so I put all this together in a presentation. I got to sit down with the with the CEO just one on one and and just let him have it. And he had he had basically no idea what was going on, like, what the people were thinking and stuff, and I just let him have it. And, and I could see that he really wanted to do something about it, and he didn't really know what to do.
Derek:And and he said, well, like, how can I start? And I said, why don't you try casual Fridays? And that's something that had come up over and over again in the interviews was, you know, we've always we want casual Fridays. They were dressed formally, but no one ever had outside contact with anyone. So, you know, these days, we wouldn't understand why they were dressed up, but they know that was the culture.
Derek:If we could just have casual Fridays, that would be a sign of change because we've been asking for it for years and it hasn't happened. We talked about some other things that he could do. And so the next time I visited that, client, and they were they were not in, in Edmonton here, so I wasn't there all the time. They had, a parking lot tailgate party where the CEO was not in a suit for the first time that anyone had ever seen. You know, jeans and a golf shirt, flipping burgers.
Derek:People came up to me and they said, I can't believe it. What did you like, how did you do this? It changed. And then that would that allowed them to form some teams to look at some of the other stuff, integrating their systems, and and changing their value creation process. So there is some there's some times when, you know, that that early win is important.
Derek:I don't know that anyone there thought that it was low hanging fruit in the sense that they hadn't ever had, any momentum on anything ever. So they just needed something to signal the change. So I I I think that's an that's an interesting example of, let's go we gotta get this thing moving somehow, and then once it's moving, then let's direct it to where it needs to go.
Dave:That's that's really interesting because as you're you're sort of saying that, I'm thinking so quite often when we think of low hanging fruit and we're talking about it, it's it's when we talk at central dynamics, you have purpose, path, and people. And a lot of times within the path side, you're looking at drivers and constraints. And so the low hanging fruit is usually in people's first place to jump to within the drivers and constraint conversation. As you're talking about that, though, what you are addressing is very much on the people side, and and what do the individual need from the organization? What does the organization need from the people?
Dave:And so what they did was the low hanging fruit, but it was over in on the people side of things. And so I could argue that it probably was one of the more important ones to do. They didn't realize it at the time. You probably didn't realize it at the time, but, it it all fits. It's just understanding that low hanging fruit isn't always a driver as a constraints issue.
Dave:You can take it up as you would call to the meta level That's right. Where you're starting to talk purpose, path, and people, and and and which which of those pillars and how they interact is is the more important one to focus on first.
Derek:Yeah. I appreciate that analysis from something that, you know, happened a long time ago, Dave, because what needed to happen is the people needed to have some confidence that if they stretched out a little bit, the things would get better.
Dave:Mhmm.
Derek:And that's, that's all that we did. And it could have been anything that happened to be in the in the late nineties. Casual Friday was a thing, and, they didn't have it. And they got it, and they said, wow, if that can happen, then anything can happen. So, so it was really it was really kind of fun to see that.
Derek:There's one other thing I wanted to go back to we talk about, and that is this idea that, if you're pursuing low hanging fruit, maybe it's because you're either risk averse or dare I say complacent or lazy. And I guess you could look at your motivation and say, is your motivation to create an illusion of progress? In which case, that's a sign that, we're not doing the right thing.
Dave:Mhmm.
Derek:If if your motivation is to crack things open, and, and then take the next thing on and get and get substantive in your change, if that's your motivation, then I'd I think you could do the same change, and it would it would be seen differently. It would feel different, and you would move forward. But if you're just trying to make it look like you're doing stuff, terrible waste of time enough.
Dave:Well, I think that that idea of I don't know if if lazy mindset's quite the right word for it. Maybe it's comfortably stuck, maybe something like that. But I think that's a a whole deeper, totally different conversation we could have, and and maybe we should park that and then try it for next time because, man, there's a lot there on that one.
Derek:Okay. So let's close off on, on this conversation then, And the the risks of chasing the easy solutions are they might not have any impact. They you know, at best, they might be a distraction. At worst, they might introduce things into the system that have unintended consequences. If you're doing something to look like you're making progress, fundamentally, that's wrong.
Derek:And so let's not start our change journey by saying what's the easiest thing we could fix. Let's let's start by saying what really needs to be connected so that we can add value in this process. We can accomplish the purpose of the organization.
Dave:Right. And so before we dive off into doing the easy thing, the the quick assessment of making sure it's the right thing by sort of screening it, does it align with your purpose? Is it purpose X, purpose Y is the easy first one. And then the second one is looking at it within, I'm testing my hypothesis. Let's go, see if we can improve the perfect path in people.
Dave:And if we go with this one, let's test it and see what what the reactions are from it and how to keep improving the value.
Derek:Is this gonna remove a significant limitation to us creating value?
Dave:Yeah.
Derek:And is this gonna remove a significant block to engaging our people?
Dave:Yep. Because a lot of times, you know, as in so many things in life, it's sometimes you just gotta go take on the hard things. You know? Let's just bite the bullet and and take on the big ones.
Derek:That's right. And and the whole idea, if we to pull us all the way back to central dynamics, we start with the idea of being on an epic quest. And of course, that gives hard things meaning because we're accomplishing a great purpose. So let's, let's get solid on the purpose, and then, yeah, we can do hard things. So I think that's our time, and, great conversation.
Derek:Dave, thanks very much. Dave and I can be found at Unconstrained. We're being helped in the backroom by Brynn Griffiths. Brynn, thanks for thanks for your help. And until next time, everyone, consider your quest.