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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 Derek Hudson. Essential Dynamics is a framework I've been working on that helps us work through challenging opportunities. And the Essential Dynamics podcast, we is used to test the concepts of essential dynamics through deep conversations with interesting people. I'm delighted to have doctor Marvin Washington back to the podcast.
Derek:Marvin, thanks for rejoining me on this, in this discussion.
Marvin:Oh, thanks for having me. It was really exciting. I'm looking forward to continuing with the discussion.
Derek:Alright. So, if you want, more information on Marvin's bio, check the last podcast. But he's, the incoming dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Alberta, which is my alma mater, and, puts him back in, wonderful Edmonton, Alberta. So great excited to have him here. Marvin, we've, we've talked about something that we could share in this in this second podcast, and let me see if I can set it up.
Derek:I've, in in many aspects of my life, I've I've come to learn that if there's a transfer of knowledge between a teacher and a student, or a consultant and an organization, or between a coach and a coachee, The limiting factor generally is going to be the capacity of the receiver to absorb what's being put down. I have been in lessons where that's been the topic and the instructor has dumped out more than anyone can handle.
Marvin:Yes. Mhmm.
Derek:While we're talking about the point, we are not demonstrating the point in the delivery. You've got experience as, as a consultant, as an instructor, as a leader of instructors. You're now stepping into this important position at the University of Alberta. I'd be real interested in your thoughts on this topic.
Marvin:This is such a great topic because it varies based on the role, and so much of the role that you play really is a way to think through the actual number of engagements you have. And so when I'm leading my team, in theory, I see them every day. So we can do, here's the big piece, I'll break it down into small pieces. Because I see them every day. They're outside my hall or their office is next to mine.
Marvin:When I'm a teacher in a classroom with a student, maybe I see them once a week. Maybe I see them and there's like nine engagements or 12 engagements, then we're done. Well, I can't think of it the same way as if I see them every day. And then if I'm a consultant, I may see them four times in a month and then never see them again. And I think we, we take knowledge as if we're actually there all the time every day with them so that we can give them the most complex, like, model because we will be there every minute, every step of the way to break them down.
Marvin:Like if it was me leading my team. When you're a teacher, that's not the case. When you're a consultant, that's not the case. So now the question becomes, it's almost like I need to give you the framework so that we have a sense of where we're trying to go and then give you the plan for how we're getting there. Let's just talk about this part today.
Marvin:Let's just talk about this part tomorrow. It's part of a big puzzle, but we gotta bring it piece by piece. And then the great ones, they keep sight of the puzzle piece and the puzzle. We often on too much detail on the puzzle piece, or we on only talking about the puzzle and then the students or the managers you're working with get hung up on the puzzle piece. And I think it's that interplay that we learn that backwards with our books.
Marvin:The books that we wrote really came out of a long engagement with the country of Botswana. We'd go over one week and talk to a leadership team roughly every four months. We did that for about seven years. And at some point we said, what if we stop and wrote down what we've been telling people so that they would have this insight when we weren't there, which worked wonderful in Botswana, because they would see us take a thousand notes and then our books were sort of like summaries of notes. Did not work to hand it to the person on the street because it wasn't detailed enough.
Marvin:There wasn't enough engagement in there. They would read the book and they would go, well, this is simple. Yeah, it is simple because we were imagining you had eighty hours of contact hours with us on the how it's complicated while you're reading the simple book on the airplane home, on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The book by itself didn't work if you didn't have the contact with us.
Derek:Okay. So there is some deep and profound stuff in there, and I'm gonna start with the the framework and or the the puzzle and the pieces. So that's something that I was fortunate with, when I started working on essential dynamics. So I've told this story in the podcast before, but the beginning of the pandemic, I'm rebooting my consulting business after seven years. It's the beginning of the pandemic.
Derek:And, I'm talking with one of my former colleagues, Bruce Alton, and, he says, Derek, you need a framework. He says, you're good at some stuff. People who know you know what that is. How do you explain to someone else? You need a framework.
Derek:And, so I started working on a framework. And the framework came to me in a fairly short period of time as I look back on all my experience in life and things that I've done. The framework is very simple. I took maybe two minutes to explain it in our previous podcast. That's not a very good book.
Derek:Yes. But as you think about how you apply it, I'm this is, episode, 70 of the podcast. We haven't run out of stuff to talk about. So there's a there's a lot to it. I really like what you say about, you know, working with a group of people.
Derek:If you can give them the framework early, not necessarily so they understand it, but they see kind of where things start to piece together when you give them the pieces. Yeah. And and I think there's a lot of value to that. The framework on its own, not tangible enough. The pieces on their own don't make enough sense.
Derek:And so your role and what like, when you're in high touch, it's framework and pieces together. And when you have to just leave a book behind, the framework alone wasn't enough.
Marvin:Yeah. I mean, this is, we use I love your phrase, a framework. We use the idea of a recipe. You take a bunch of nine year olds and give them recipe for a cake, they'll bake a cake. You take five star Michelin chefs and give them recipe for the cake.
Marvin:They'll make the cake, somehow it's a different cake. Yeah. So the recipe is a key part of it. The recipe is not all of it. And partly what you're trying to convey is that.
Marvin:You're trying to convey that the recipe I'm giving you, it's a key part, but if you just took it absent any engagement, absent any further discussion, you're more likely to get the nine year old cake, not the master chef's cake. And I think what you want is this master chef cake, and you probably know this as, you know, you can say words like purpose and people and they'll go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. And you'd be like, no, you don't.
Derek:No, no, yeah.
Marvin:The same way that you get it in such a rudimentary form, but I needed to put it that way so you don't get lost. Right? I can't give you a 37 step process. You're gonna get lost. I can't give you, you know, here are the here's the acronym and the acronym spells 15 words, because you'll get lost.
Marvin:So how can I take that into a way that you know where you are, but at the same time, we can go into depth? As a teacher, that's what the syllabus is supposed to be. The syllabus says, let's not get lost in this class. I teach a strategy class. Here are the four pillars of strategy.
Marvin:We cover the first pillar of these three weeks, second pillar of these three weeks. So if we're in week eight, you're not lost as a student, but the material in week eight is much deeper than the syllabus, right? You can't just take my syllabus and go, Oh, I've had strategy. Why don't you just sit in the class? That's just so that you don't get confused of, well, why are we talking about this again?
Marvin:Help me understand how this week connect to the next week from last week or before. That's what the syllabus is doing, it's the weekly conversations that we're unpacking that. And a great teacher does that seamlessly. They move between the complexity of the week and the simplicity of the syllabus, or they move from the sugar is sugar is sugar, but when you do it this way, you get a totally different taste in cake than when you do it that way.
Derek:K. I I I like that. One of the things that, I'm thinking of now is the difference between the syllabus and the table of contents. Mhmm. So I was introduced to business model canvas a few years ago.
Derek:Before that it was startup wheel. And, both of those things in my mind is a table of contents. Mhmm. That's like that's like the stuff you need to think about when you have a new business or an immature business or you're starting one. What I'm more interested in is the idea of a business model, which is, the process map, the cause and effect.
Derek:Then I have a context for any one of those topics. And I can I can say, okay? So I'm gonna, you know, throw out a business topic and I'll say, at this stage of your organization, if this is the flow of how you create value, this is where that fits. Otherwise, you have a list of 10 or 20 or 30 things, and you think you have to know them all. And really, one is important right now.
Derek:Yeah. And if and if you're the if you're the master teacher, you'll help the students both know which one it is and then understand what they need to do.
Marvin:Yeah. And what what I what I try to move toward and partly it's because the pace of knowledge is moving faster and faster and faster. So I've stopped trying to play the, I know every buzzword and every acronym out there now. I moved to here's some questions you should be thinking about as a business leader. There are lots of different books and topics and everything else that will help you answer this question.
Marvin:Here are the questions you should think about. Yeah. And I think, and when I think about your framework, I think about your framework is really saying, here are some questions that you should be thinking about. Now, if you've adopted this acronym or this acronym or that acronym, I'm not gonna sit here and wrestle over which acronym is the right acronym. Yeah.
Marvin:What I will help you think about is how does that one help you answer this question? How does that one help you answer this specific question? And then let's talk about will you have no answers to the questions?
Derek:Well, I think one of the things that does is it turns the, recipient or the student or the client into an agent.
Marvin:Yes.
Derek:And they own the process of discovery that can only happen when you have your own question and you're trying to find an answer as opposed to when your instructor is dumping disconnected stuff on you.
Marvin:You got it. And and again and we both know this now. Right? Before Internet and YouTube, I could sit at the front of the room and lecture because I was giving you knowledge that other than the Encyclopedia Britannica, other than the library, you couldn't get any place else. Now, whatever I'm getting ready to say, you can get that knowledge someplace else.
Marvin:You can Google what's the right strategy and you'll get podcast and talks and everything else. So then I don't think the goal is for me to sort of write on the board what's the best strategy and provide a lot of words, I think is to help you begin to think about what is the best strategy. Begin to, you mentioned earlier, hypothesize, but what do I think this is? What's my going in position? What leverage do I think I should pull on in order to get the best strategy?
Marvin:Once I can get my students, to think that through, once I can get my leaders to do that, when I coach leaders, once I can get them to begin to think about what might be the best liver in order to have my team perform at a high degree. Once I can get them thinking about that, then we can talk about all different types of answers, but I can't I need them to start with, it's their question to answer. It's their thing to ponder. It's their, is their journey? Is their quest?
Marvin:You know, is there again, I'm going back to your words because I think they're just they say it so nicely because that's what you want the leader to do. Oh, I need to figure out what's gonna make this meeting awesome on Friday. Yes. Once you figure it out, then we can talk about 50 different books that may help you with that. But you can't just grab a book and go, this is the answer, until you know what the question is first.
Derek:And then and then the process continues because the leader says, okay, this I want this meeting to be awesome on Friday. And then you're going right to, well, who's in the meeting?
Marvin:Yes.
Derek:Where are they right now? What kind of experience do I want them to have? And and then in my experience, usually that's then, okay, so what kind of questions am I gonna be asking people to think about so they can have experience in that meeting that means something for them, so that when whatever we come out with, they it's theirs, they own it, I didn't manipulate it into their head, and then that's something real that's gonna change in an organization.
Marvin:You got it. And that to me is the that's the that's the game of leadership. And I use that word game specifically because when we play a game, we play whether we win or lose. We know there will be people that will win. I'll play poker with friends and sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.
Marvin:I don't stop playing just because I lose. So often leaders go into a meeting and they had a bad meeting and they go, Ah, let me just give up on this whole thing. Or they had a bad quarter and go, This was No, that was the game. You went into the meeting, you thought you had a great plan and you know, we both sat, we live in Alberta, we both sat in meetings where everybody all of a sudden looks down on their phone because some external announcement just hit and whatever we thought we were gonna talk about the next twenty minutes, we're not talking about for the next twenty minutes. Yeah.
Marvin:Okay. That means that we have to refigure this and figure something else out and then find a way and a timing to put a team back together again to work on something else. But that's leadership, figuring it out, trying to decide how do I get the most out of people today, this small piece, but in the long run, the puzzle in a will. And to me, that's the fun part. When I think about going back into a leadership role as the college dean, that's the fun part for me, the game of how do I take me and my team and we go do great stuff knowing the challenges to do there, Knowing, you know, the, the uncertainty that comes with any leadership role.
Derek:So so you're gonna be leading, my my perception of university is, largely formed by own my by my own experience as a student. And in, business faculty, I've not been overwhelmed with the, with the academic side. I haven't paid as much attention to it. I mean, I've got my I got my books here, and, you know, I'm very interested in that, but I I I really come from a from a student point of view. And so and I'm gonna extend business to the other faculties that you're responsible for.
Derek:How do you move from a system which I think is still centered on a professor conveying knowledge, to one that's gonna really liven up the student in a situation, you know, the the financial and with the ratios and and the and the students where they're coming from out of out of three years of COVID high school and stuff like that.
Marvin:Yeah.
Derek:What what are some of the things you think you can do?
Marvin:Yeah. I I the first it's I think the first answer to your question is to recognize that that's the question. Right? I mean, I think, again, I've been in academia now for some version of it, since my PhD days in a specific sense, that's the early, early nineties. Right?
Marvin:Mhmm. I think I have to, we have to first stop and think about the students going to U of A today were not the students that were my, like, cohort when I went to undergrad in the eighties. And it's easy to not, to forget that because they look the same, they're sitting in similar chairs, they have, but they're not the same. And so I think the first step is let's have that conversation. Yeah.
Marvin:And then once we have that conversation, let's not be afraid of that conversation because it's like, oh, they're not the same. That means this thing is all falling apart, run, the universities are horrible, it's not gonna lie. Because we go to the other side, we go to the sky is falling, the sky is falling part of they're not the same. I think the exciting thing for universities today is that one, especially when you take away the science aside, we are horrible at self PR. We are horrible.
Marvin:There are so many cool things happening in the arts faculty that we just don't know about. And I think it's because we've become naively consumed with STEM. So science, technology, engineering, and math, and we think that's the thing. We We understand the role of medicine, that's the thing. So we need PR.
Marvin:We need to say, look at the cool things we're doing. And then two, I think we need to take advantage of I got no idea, I have a three year old son, I have no idea what career he will be doing in twenty one years. Because if we sat here twenty one years ago, we would have had zero success in predicting the careers today. No one would have thought that we'd be working at Facebook or Google or doing this podcast, or we wouldn't have thought any of that twenty one years ago. So I'm not constrained by, I need to get my son ready to be a fill in the blank.
Marvin:Yeah. I'm excited about I need to help him understand complexity, understand to get excited about something in the world, understand about the sophistication of the world and the people in it. And I think if we can help get people excited about that, they'll figure out where they're going. When I went to school, it was one of seven degrees. That's what they were.
Marvin:Now you figure out you and then you'll figure out what you wanna go do. It looks like somebody's gonna pay you for that.
Derek:Yeah. That Marvin, that's fantastic. So I was in, this law class I'm teaching last week, and I was trying to tell a story from 1985. And, I just wanna get some context, so I was trying to figure out who in the class was born in the twentieth century and nobody was.
Marvin:Yes. Yes.
Derek:And so I realized this is a different bunch of kids. They have some world perspective and, skills that, man, I didn't have when I started university. And they have access to information. That's not the problem. So so so the problem is, like you said, teach them how to understand complexity, how to solve problems, how to be creative.
Derek:And so I'm really excited about, your opportunity. And and it's kind of cool that I'm, you know, on campus again after so, so very long.
Marvin:And I think and again, this was not scripted, but I think it's so cool that people like you are coming back to campus. Because I think, again, we can't say the world looks different than it did forty years ago and not then go attract a different type of instructor. The old days, the instructors that we attracted were instructors that were the knowledge creators and they were giving out knowledge. Well, we can get knowledge on our phones. So now we need instructors with different skill sets, with different passions that are able to blend and combine and have a foot in the academic world.
Marvin:You went to university, you have a degree, you understand that world, and at the same time, a foot in the practical world, you're working with the messiness of the work in business. And we need somebody that can do both of those. And I think, I'm excited that universities in the year of Alberta is opening up those possibilities and sort of, you know, be entrepreneurial by creating an entrepreneurial class with people that are entrepreneurial. It's so often that we would have a class on entrepreneurship, but the person teaching the class would not be entrepreneurial in teaching a class on entrepreneurship. So this is actually really cool that is coming together like that.
Marvin:And that's exciting to me.
Derek:Well, I love that. And I talked earlier about the instructor instructing on how to instruct people, not doing it the right way. So it's very meta, and we're at a particularly cool place in time, and I'm excited about that. It makes me feel young. Yes.
Derek:So so so Marvin, we've, again, exhausted our time. It just will go so fast. Thanks very much for being on the podcast. Remind us again, what's the best way to find you?
Marvin:Yep. So the best way to find me, again, you'll Google me. I have a website, marvinwashington.com, and it's one word, marvinwashington.com. Pretty easy to find. And if you just Google my name, feel free to you'll find me.
Marvin:If you find another Marvin Washington, chances are he's an American football player that's a little bigger and taller than me. I'm not that person.
Derek:Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, Essential Dynamics podcast is brought to you by Unconstrained, my consultancy. We help leaders work through their trickiest opportunities, and you can find us at getgetunconstrained.com. I'd like to thank Bryn for his service in the studio.
Derek:And Marvin, hope we can do this again, and I'll see you on campus as well. Welcome. Welcome back, Edmonton.
Marvin:Hey. Thanks a
Derek:lot, everyone.
Marvin:Thanks for having me.
Derek:Okay, everyone. Until next time. Consider your quest.