Drivers

What is a 'driver'? Why are they important in your quest?

Show Notes

Derek is at derekhudson.ca. 
See full show notes at 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!

Reed: 00:21

Welcome to Essential Dynamics with Derek Hudson, a podcast in pursuit of clear thinking. I'm Reed McColm. And, so I'm talking here with Derek Hudson, a deep thinker who helps CEOs work through their trickiest opportunities. Hello, Derek. Good to be back with you today.

Derek: 00:40

It's nice to talk to you. I should tell our audience too that we're Zooming still as this pandemic has required us to separate. I really had thought that during this project, would move in with Derek and his family, but that's not happened, so we've had to Zoom. And I hope that's been been okay for you. I think I think it's working fine with for me.

Reed: 01:06

How about you, Derek? We read stories to our grandkids over Zoom at night. Yeah. I did The Hobbit. My wife's working on The Princess Bride.

Reed: 01:17

Well, those are not short stories. No. It's it's multi months to get it done. But they're super attentive. They're all great readers.

Reed: 01:26

Even the grade oners can read now, and so it's super fun. That's great. Well, today, Derek, we've discussed, we discussed constraints in our previous podcast, and I thought we we covered that pretty well. But in previous, explanations, you put constraints in with the same whenever you mentioned constraints, you had mentioned drivers. And now I wanna know about drivers.

Reed: 01:54

Explain what you mean when you say constraints and drivers. What is a driver? So if you if you think about the concepts and essential dynamics we've talked about before, essential dynamics is based on the idea of a quest where we're trying to accomplish something meaningful. And in a quest, there's three elements that I see. One is that purpose, that meaningful thing we're trying to accomplish.

Reed: 02:19

Another is the people involved. And the third is the path that the people have to take to go accomplish the purpose of the quest. People Path. Path, and purpose. Is that right?

Reed: 02:32

Those are the essential elements. And now all of those are subject to dynamic forces. Okay. Think about the yin and yang of the universe. Opposing forces are what make everything meaningful and make things happen.

Reed: 02:46

There has to be that struggle or those opposing forces. So when I think about the path, which is the journey that we take or in organizations, the processes and systems that we use to accomplish our purposes. In my mind, a way to look at those opposing forces is drivers are the things that naturally move us towards the purpose, and constraints are the things that naturally hold us back. So the interplay of drivers and constraints is this is this dynamic interaction where we find so much of the work that we do and there's so much opportunity when we understand that to better accomplish things that we set up to do on our quest. So I talked last time about the theory of constraints, which is highly developed.

Reed: 03:37

And I don't know that this is the theory of drivers, but I feel like there's another side of constraints, which is drivers, and that's what I've been exploring since I put this together a few months ago. When I was in theater, when I'm in a in a theatrical situation, which I frequently am, we talk about motivations of characters. Is that, is that similar to what we're talking about with drivers? Yeah. Read, that's a great that's a great catch.

Reed: 04:05

Absolutely. I think that's that's exactly right. And so if I can try and understand this as an actor, you're playing the part of someone else. Yes. And and if all you do is figure out what that motivates them, you can do your job.

Reed: 04:23

Is that right? Yeah. You have to know the lines. It's it's important to know the lines. I think that's probably basic.

Reed: 04:30

But, yes, if you can understand why the character does the things the character does, then, you're home free as far as an actor is concerned. So what I'm interested in, you know, helping people and organization organizations do them through Essential Dynamics is to discover the drivers, the ones that are innate or the ones that are compelling. And if you can if you can attach what you're doing to a driver, then everything becomes way less work. Okay. I I wanna know what you mean when you say attach it to a driver.

Reed: 05:14

I'm still thinking in theatrical terms, my motivation. If I'm what am I attaching? I I I'm unclear. So let's just let's just flip this around a little bit and go to the world that I've been in for many years where you're a manager and you have an employee. Yeah.

Reed: 05:31

And so the manager is responsible for accomplishing something in the organization, and by definition, a manager does that through other people. So I'm trying to get people to do something. The work that I've been involved in for many years has all been, you know, knowledge work. So, you know, it's not people with their hands on things working on assembly line. So it's your about how people are thinking and processing and writing and creating and analyzing.

Reed: 06:03

And if you can line up their internal motivation Uh-huh. With with the needs of the system that you're creating to accomplish your purpose, then everything's less work. So in a sense, you're as an actor, you say, for this character, what's my motivation? If you're a manager, you look at one of your employees and say, what's their motivation? Now in the past, in a sort of command and control environment, what you would do is you would say, I'll tell you how you're gonna be motivated.

Reed: 06:41

And There was a I'm sorry. No. Go ahead. I was just going to say there was a famous theater director who lived to the age of a hundred and five and was still working at a hundred and one named George Abbott on Broadway. And he was famous for telling his actors during a show called Damn Yankees.

Reed: 06:59

He was asked, what's there it's about baseball. And one of the actors was asking, what's my motivation? And he said, your paycheck. Just get this done. I'll worry about the motivations.

Reed: 07:12

And Yeah. And for that show, it certainly worked. Well, but that's that's the thing is if if I wanna motivate people with a paycheck, first of all, that costs money. Yes. Second, I I may have a difficult time helping them understand exactly what they need to do Yes.

Reed: 07:37

Because you have more money on their paycheck. And third, that might not be the right thing for the organization. Yeah. I may be sub suboptimizing by, you know, rewarding something, which has other effects that that I didn't anticipate. So this idea of drivers is, you know, it's a compliment to constraints, but it's if I didn't inject yin and yang.

Reed: 08:00

Constraints and drivers are yin and yang. I got it. Okay. Yeah. If I didn't inject any more energy into the system, what would move it along naturally?

Reed: 08:11

Okay. So if you think yeah. If you think about you know, we've talked about family stuff as well. If you think if you think about trying to help a a child in school, you know, there's only so much external forces you can put on a kid's learning. But if you can find the driver inside the child and figure out what motivates them, then all of a sudden, you don't have to do anything, but, you know, maybe maybe channel it or provide resources.

Reed: 08:44

I like that. I like that. That's that's a crucial way of getting through to anyone, isn't it? There if you can if you can appeal to their inner driver, what may what motivates them? I get that.

Reed: 09:02

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's super cool that you brought it up the you know, that's that's one of the acting jokes that I know. Just what's my motivation? Yeah.

Reed: 09:13

Exactly. It's true. It's true. So have you seen people change? You know, I have seen people change, but I've also seen organizations change.

Reed: 09:29

And how do they change, Derek? Because are they they're still selling the same product. And what your experience, you're talking about more ethereal things like like we're selling words or we're selling in a previous podcast, you said our business is is spending money or or making checks. Well well, let's let's go to the product thing for a second because I have a really cool example, which I think will help us understand drivers and and and my interest in finding those natural drivers. So one of the business books that's had a big influence on me is Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Reed: 10:08

And in that book, which was done over or based on extensive research, thousands of hours of research on high performing consistently high performing companies. They came up with this idea of the flywheel. And initially, the flywheel, as as Jim Collins described it, was you do all these good things in an organization. And like a mechanical flywheel, they all add energy to it, and they start moving it around. And but you but it's not going that fast, it doesn't have that big an impact.

Reed: 10:43

And then all of a sudden, the company seems to take off. And he was asking people, here's the inflection point. Here's where your company really started to succeed. You know, what changed there? And the people look at him like, he's crazy.

Reed: 10:57

Because nothing changed. It's just that eventually they built up enough momentum on their flywheel by doing all the right things that it it basically carried itself. Okay. That's interesting. Tell me more about the flywheel because I don't completely understand.

Reed: 11:12

Is it a is it in is it in every organization? Is there a flywheel? Yeah. You know, I would think that a lot of organizations don't get enough things lined up in the same direction to build that kind of momentum. So the organizations that were successful that Colin studied, he was able to identify that they had these habits, you know, built up over time that created this, because it was all aligned.

Reed: 11:40

I see. Continue continue to add capacity or continue to add inertia to the flywheel. And, eventually, the motion of the flywheel is strong enough to overcome the, you know, sort of the friction that would naturally sit there, and they could really do good stuff. So this was his idea. So it was all about habits over time create the capacity for an inflection point at one point when when all the forces line up.

Reed: 12:08

But the interesting thing is in 02/2001, he was invited to come in to meet with the senior management at Amazon. And, you know, we we have our impression of Amazon in 2020 in the midst of a pandemic. But in 02/2001, they weren't quite that. And they were, you know, selling books online and, you know, had sort of survived the .com bust trying to find their way. And so Collins told them about the flywheel.

Reed: 12:35

Well, they went away, worked on it, and came back. And, basically, they transformed Jim Collins' flywheel concept. And they said, we wanna add to the flywheel elements that reinforce other elements that add to the flywheel. Oh. So we get in a, you know, sort of perpetual motion.

Reed: 12:56

Course. Yeah. So for Amazon, it was people will come buy stuff from us if it's inexpensive. So if the pry if there's good value, if the prices are low, then we can sell more product. And if we sell more product, then we can entice third party sellers onto our platform.

Reed: 13:15

So we don't warehouse this stuff. We do they just buy through through the Amazon website. And if we can get more volume running through the platform for the same platform, then our costs will go down and we can charge less. And so we can generate more customers and get more third party sellers. So their flywheel was one of self reinforcement.

Reed: 13:40

If we do this, that's gonna happen. If we do that, then that's gonna happen, and that's gonna create this thing that we started out that we're wanting in the first place. Sounds very efficient. Alright. So perpetual motion is super efficient.

Reed: 13:56

So as I thought about that and I thought about this idea of constraints, which is always focusing on the limitations, I thought, no. There's another element to it, which is what are the natural drivers that you can pull out of people or that you can build into your system because of the interaction between customers or suppliers or whatever it is. And if everybody gets what they need and that creates the capacity to generate more of that, now we're talking about a self reinforcing system of drivers. And then as we talked about before, the constraints become the control point and how we kinda lever that back so it doesn't you know, we don't have a runaway train. Right.

Reed: 14:39

Right. So so that's I think the the flywheel, not not Collins' original flywheel, but his enhanced flywheel is really, you know, a great example of what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about drivers. In fact, Collins went back and wrote a monograph on the flywheel based on not only Amazon's flywheel, but many others he was able to to pull together. So when I think about that in organizations, relationships, and individual lives, you know, as we're talking about motivating employees, I think the concept of a driver as a natural propelling force towards the purpose has a lot of power. How does a failing or struggling business reinvent themselves with the driver?

Reed: 15:32

Do they bring in somebody? Is it an artificial pickup? Well, you know, it can't be artificial. So what you have to find is where where do you add value? And that was one of the things that drove me to kinda try to understand this business model is or this concept of a business model is, what does the market need from our organization?

Reed: 15:52

What are we good at? And how do we convey value? And if you think about any kind of transaction, if both parties win, then there's an opportunity to take that up, you know, level up more and more and more. You get what I need, I get what or you get what you need, I get what I need. I'll give you more of that.

Reed: 16:12

You give me more of that. We both both do really well. And so that's that's the key is understanding in a business what your customers need and how you add value. Another way of looking at that is if the driver of an organization is the desire of the ownership to make money, I don't know that that's a compelling driver. But if the driver is the customer saying we need more of your stuff Yeah.

Reed: 16:39

Then that that completely changes things. And, you know, that was experience that I had in MicroLine at one point was all of a sudden, their customers couldn't get enough of our stuff, and we didn't there's motivation going on. We didn't motivate employees. All we did was try and break down those constraints and ship the product. I see.

Reed: 16:57

I see. That's terrific, Eric. That's a good explanation of drivers. We've talked about constraints. I think, I see now how they work hand in hand and are going to be, essential factors in our conversations from here on out.

Reed: 17:15

Drivers and constraints, man. We'll we'll we'll keep coming back to it. Derek, thanks for your time. How can people reach you? You can find me on my website, Derek Hudson dot c a.

Reed: 17:24

That's d e r e k h u d s o n dot c a. Thanks very much for your time and for talking to us and to teach us a little bit about Essential Dynamics. Until next time, consider your quest.