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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!
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Essential Dynamics. My name is Bryn Griffiths, and Derek Hudson is with me. Derek, before we get going, I've started started these episodes with quotes because I saw another one that you passed along to me not long ago. And, the the quote comes from, I think it's Tom Clancy.
Bryn:And, the line comes from debt of honor. And the quote is, if it's not written down, it didn't happen. And I've often thought about that, especially in the last week or so since you sent me that quote, went, wow, is that ever accurate?
Derek:So the backstory on that one is interesting. And it's a long time since I read the book, but it's these, I don't know if it's Japanese terrorists or the Japanese government in a fantastical world. They're trying to take down the US government. And so they get some bots in on the American stock exchanges. And so they start all this computer trading and there's rumors flying and stuff like that so the market crashes.
Derek:And this is meant to distract the Americans before they do the next military move or something like that. Okay. And so there's this huge crash and the hero Jack Ryan is a national security adviser's something in there and his his wife tells him, well, if it if it isn't written down, it didn't happen. Okay. Sorry.
Derek:Back up. Huge crash and they also hack the system. And so not only do the trades bring the market down, but then the system itself crashes. And so they no one can do any more trades and it's a mess. And so what they decide to do is they say, this day doesn't count.
Derek:We're gonna do a do over. And when it all comes out that this was hacking and stuff like that, then they just erase all the trades for that day because they don't have most of them anyway. And then they just start the day over again. So I have no idea how that applies to our topic today, that particular story, but if it isn't written down, how about we'll change it to it's not gonna happen?
Bryn:Sure. Hey.
Derek:Yeah. And kinda go from there, right?
Bryn:Yeah. Just think I think it's a it's a great story. I wish we all had do over days.
Derek:Yeah. Right? I think would maybe we do. Actually say that we do have do over days. Yeah.
Derek:Here's another one, this is way out of context but my wife and I were recently in Jasper. So we're there like thirteen, fourteen months after, you know, the town and surrounding forests were devastated by fire. And nature just nature gets up every morning and is nature, right? And so there were elk in the camp ground grazing on this beautiful fresh grass which was growing in the nutrients left by all the burned trees. And the forests are gonna come back.
Derek:Like they're gonna come back, they're gonna come back better. Give us another hundred years. We won't see it all in our lifetime, but it's already static. So the idea of having a do over is probably something that we should hang on to. But today, yeah, I do want to talk about writing and pick up on our last episode, but I want to try and get a little bit more practical because the scenario that we have is the busy business leader who runs on intuition, emotion, on emergencies and, you know, rushing around solving problems and all that kind of stuff.
Derek:Last episode we tried to make a case for that everyone needs to sit still and write and think and you can't really think unless you're writing. So that was, that's the premise. Now I just want to talk about like what would you do? How would you do that? Yeah.
Derek:And I remember actually a conversation with someone and I think the difference was you can be strategic or you can be tactical. And I said, yeah, I find that if I want to be strategic, sometimes I need to leave my office and go someplace else and just change the scenery and then sit down and then, you know, often even just like a blank pad of paper. But at the time I'm like, okay, I've got this far. I have no idea now what to do. Right.
Derek:I know that it's not answering the phone and, you know, checking email all day. It's something more proactive than that. I don't know what to do. Now I think I have some ideas.
Bryn:Hey. Hey. But woah. I just gotta stop you here for a second though on one thing. I think a change of scenery is great for me.
Bryn:Like, for example, I could work out of my studio. I could work out of my office just down the hallway. Sometimes the best work that I'm able to come up with creatively is if I take my laptop and I go to a coffee shop. And I know that it's a circus around me, but for some reason, it just seems to enlighten me a little bit further than being in the same areas all the time. It it really works well for me, but there are times I've got to those places and I wanna get some work done and I just can't.
Bryn:But you know what? I highly recommend that people take their show on the road so to speak. I think it's good.
Derek:We talk about you gotta step out of the system to see the system. Yeah. And so sometimes physically moving yourself out of the chaos is a part of that. And another part is writing because then you're forced to make coherent observations about what's happening. And so maybe we could pick up from that.
Derek:I guess I would say there's maybe two angles to take here. One is if you're gonna write down something about your business, you're trying to be strategic, you're in a quiet place with your blank piece of paper and you have to write. I think some of the techniques that work quite well, first thing is to do a brain dump and write what's in your head. You have no outline, no agenda, just write what's in your head. I'm really worried about this.
Derek:I don't know about that. This thing is a problem. I really wish we could do this. Just kind of get it out. I usually do a brain dump every week in my weekly planning.
Derek:But just kinda get it out. That's one thing you could do. Another thing is if you're maybe in a little more negative mode, you could use what they call them theory of constraints to Oodie's. The what? OODES.
Derek:Okay. D E, undesirable effects. Wow. And it's it's it's it's like complain. Write down the bad stuff that's happening.
Derek:So I had an opportunity to do this with the client kind of it was almost a sneaky way because we started our relationship with conversations. In fact, before it was a professional engagement, just was a conversation. It turned into a professional engagement and I got three hours of a dump from my client. This is all the stuff that's going wrong. And after I had my notes for three sessions, I went, there's got to be a root cause here.
Derek:What's really going on? And so I used something that's called a current reality tree. This is from theory of constraints. And all you do is you try to figure out what bad things are caused by other bad things and then what causes those things. And eventually you can kind of diagram out a tree that comes down to a common trunk, which is your core problem.
Derek:And in this case, it was revelatory to me and I'm like, that's the problem? Really? Just that thing? And then I sat down with the client and I kind of played it all back and he went, that's the problem? Well, we can fix that.
Derek:And so the first idea about Oodie's, it's also a brainstorming thing is you don't qualify. You don't, you know, decide what to write down and what not to you just put it just all goes down because you're just you're trying to get to something. So it all comes down, then you sort it out. So that's a different step as you sort it out. And then if you can figure out what your core problem is or your main limitation is or maybe what your constraint is, then you've got reality, you've got a diagnosis, you've got something that you can work with.
Derek:I don't think that you can do that process nearly as well if you're not writing, whether that's individually or in a group. And there's something very cathartic about writing down a bad thing and then moving to the next bad thing rather than ruminating in our minds over and over again about this one bad thing. And then when you start to stitch the logic together, you realize that you don't actually have to worry about all these bad things because there's only one thing that's happening that's causing a bunch of them and and you actually could maybe solve that.
Bryn:You you know I love here though? You've gone from the top of the tree down. A lot of people that I know wouldn't think of that. They would go from the base, the roots up. But I I think you're absolutely correct.
Bryn:I I think you're absolutely correct in when you say sometimes you've got to take a look at that and work your way down to the Well,
Derek:there's a reason things bug us and maybe the world's trying to give us a signal and, you know, we can can get bugged by a lot of things. And I'm it's Stephen Covey quotes it. The author might come to me, but it's for every thousand people hacking at the leaves, there is one person that's chopping the root. And so we're trying to get to root cause there. So there's that.
Derek:The other thing is more on the aspirational side. So I want to take this organization somewhere. I want my life to get somewhere and I found a really great resource. Richard Rummalt, I've quoted him before. The lead book is called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.
Derek:And Rummalt is highly critical of most of the strategic plans that you see in organizations. He says many of them are filled with buzzwords and platitudes masquerading a strategy. He calls that the fluff problem. It's like there's jargon, there's, you know, things in there, it's sustainable, there's integration, you know, stuff like that and there's these words. But then if you actually looked at the words, it doesn't say anything.
Derek:And so that's a problem and I've seen that a lot of places. Then the other thing is that they don't actually address the problem. We've talked about constraints in a lot of episodes. We've talked about the crux. We talked about the tension between purpose x and purpose y or between people and the path, stuff like that.
Derek:If you wanna accomplish something in the future, you gotta lay out what the problem is. And most strategies don't say we suck because they're just taking us from an awesome place, which isn't really awesome to an even better place with some words. And then the other thing that they run out complaints about them doing is they think a strategy is a goal. You know, you can have a goal, it's important to have a goal. The strategy is what's going to change between now and when we're at the goal.
Derek:And most times, and I've been involved in these probably closer than I care to admit, we just have a new goal. Like, we haven't identified the old problem, we have a new goal. You know, I mean, I don't wanna be critical, but in our own lifestyle, when we try and change our habits, I have a new goal, it's I'm gonna run a marathon, I'm gonna fit in these pants, but that's not the problem. The problem is some basic ways that we handle stress in our life. Some basic lifestyle choices we make.
Derek:And if you got through those, you could do all in any of those things and organizations are no different. And then the last criticism that I get from Ramel is that the idea of having a template business plan or a template strategy or a fill in the blanks form kind of approach. And the problem with that is that if you don't know what your problem is, you don't know if a particular template is gonna solve it. And the templates aren't gonna drive you to go back and figure out what the problem is. And so we actually need I said this in last episode and previous episodes.
Derek:We actually things actually need to make sense. There needs to be a cause and effect, what I call natural law. If you want an outcome, you have to do the prerequisites to get the outcome. And if you put that together, you might call it a strategy. It looks a lot more operational, but that's how you build a system.
Derek:And I believe that that's the kind of stuff you should be writing down. So is that landing with you, Brent?
Bryn:Yeah, is. See, I guess maybe I call it something a little different. Strategy is a great word to use. Goal setting is huge. I consider it a roadmap and I'll tell you why because I don't always take the freeway.
Bryn:Every once in a while I like to maybe take the off ramp and take a surface road and try to get to my destination just a little bit differently, but I still know where my destination is. But but I I really call it a road map because sometimes you do have to alter your direction somewhat. There's construction. We live in a city that's full of construction. You know that to get from point a to point b may not be the straightest line.
Bryn:But for me, that's I I guess that's my strategy is to always make sure that I can pivot a little bit while not forgetting where my goal is or where where I wanna end up.
Derek:And There's there's some great points in there for business leaders. Right? That That pivot sounds like a big thing. Well, it's a big thing if we made a bet assuming a chain of causality which we don't actually know that we don't have a handle on. Whereas you're better off to make a bet to take you to the next decision point and test some hypotheses and find out where you should go from there.
Derek:Doesn't fly with the board.
Bryn:No, the pivot's a bad word too, right? I've seen business guys cringe when they hear the word pivot but sometimes you've just got to adapt.
Derek:Yeah, so you know what I like to think about is building a system. And what do we want the system to do? We want the system to flow. If I had a system that flows, you know, do I need a strategy? Well, the thing about a system that flows is it's now resilient.
Derek:It's adaptable. It gets signals early and does something with them. And that's the kind of stuff that I would encourage business leaders to think about when they're writing is like, why is this the case? Where are we stuck? Where's our crux?
Derek:What's the unsolvable problem that we have? The root of all the undesirable effects. How are we gonna address that? And then you say, well, you know, maybe we don't know. Okay.
Derek:So then let's design an experiment. And if you design an experiment and you write it down and you have a predicted result, then you can do something. If you get the predicted result, can say, well, maybe it's because of this action we took. So let's do it again. If you didn't get the predicted result, you can ask yourself, well, what happened?
Derek:And you know what happens most of the time, Brent? Is the thing that you said you were gonna do, you didn't do it. Right? Yeah. So for example, if it's, I believe that if I make 10 sales calls a day for the whole month, I will land my two big sales that I need.
Derek:And then at the end of the month, you didn't land your two big sales. The first question the sales manager could ask is, how many calls did you make a day? And if you didn't make your 10 calls a day, then you can't complain about the process because you're not following it. If you had three months in a row of making 10 calls a day and you didn't get your sales, then you could say, well, I don't think that our assumption is valid. I think there's something missing here.
Bryn:I can't close.
Derek:Yeah, that's right. Or our product sucks or something like that. This idea then of writing includes what we see, what it really means, like let's get down to root cause, what's our problem and then let's write an experiment. Let's write a hypothesis and test it. And if you do that, you can make progress in your organization.
Derek:A lot of times when you write stuff down, you look at it and you say, that doesn't make sense. Why would I expect that result to happen from these actions? Well, these are the actions we always take and we're not getting the result. So let's logically think it through. You have to write that stuff down.
Derek:That's where you can get more people involved if you have stuff written down as well. And that's where you can circle the point where you didn't comply and increase your compliance. So now we can test our process. Or to say, there's no way we're going to get the result because we don't have all the steps in place to get that result. I remember, and you probably remember as a kid in the comics, there was like how to draw the Mona Lisa, you know, and there's like a circle and then a half circle and that's her head and her body.
Derek:And then two dots for eyes and then in the fourth picture, it's the Mona Lisa.
Bryn:Yeah. Kinda. Not really, kinda.
Derek:You didn't show me how to do that. So I think we are just we make these, you know, leaps. And so in the in the one sense, we talk about the leader who doesn't write anything down and they talk and then people are hanging on every word because they changed the story. You know, I mean, I've had leaders of this where there's a new shiny object and the story changes every time they talk. So that's exciting and people are taking notes like that's now the gospel, but of course it's gonna change.
Derek:So there's ones who don't write stuff down. Then there's the ones who write stuff down, but it doesn't actually hold up. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't tell anyone what they should be doing. And then there's this idea of, you know, these are the things that are important.
Derek:This is how we show they're important. This is how we, you know, remind each other. And if that's something that resonates with people on the team, then there's a lot of power in that. And like you said, in your experience, I don't know what my leader's thinking. I don't understand what they're thinking.
Derek:Why? Now I understand what they're thinking, but it doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Or I don't have any idea how I could contribute to it. Let's use this writing so that people can have in their own hands something that makes sense to them that shows how they can contribute to an organization.
Bryn:Well, I've worked with very few people, Derek. I've worked with very few people who don't wanna be successful. They don't want to get from where I'm at right now with this company or with the people I work with to either an endpoint or to the next phase. Everybody wants to be successful. Everybody wants to take pride in what they do.
Bryn:But if the vision is not being shared clearly or in form, it's just not gonna I don't think it's gonna happen.
Derek:So let me just in the last few minutes here, let me just talk for a bit about what a leader who wants to kind of take this on could do. We talked about writing down various things from the problems to the root cause to the sort of hypothesis, stuff like that. So that's very hard to do. One thing you shouldn't do is ask a consultant to write it for you. Because you have to go through the process and a consultant probably isn't going to get it right.
Derek:And if you get a report from a consultant, guess what? Now you have a report from a consultant. You don't have a plan. I don't tend to write very much for my clients as a result of that. But you could get value from a conversation with a guide who asks you questions about all of those steps and makes you think it through.
Derek:And I feel I need to be more directive or more encouraging to my clients to get them to write some of those insights down and then to build on it. And so I'm working on, this is like a soft reveal at this point. I'm working on AI tools that will help with that, with the conversation that goes on to diagnose and then come up with a model, a logic model for how you can proceed in your business. So I'm working on that but what I can tell you is I guess you need to write it down. Don't outsource the writing of it down to a consultant.
Derek:Really don't outsource it to AI. But as I think you mentioned, Bren, you can definitely use AI to check your work.
Bryn:Do it two or three times.
Derek:One of the great things about AI and I've done this a little bit, think we all could do it more is, Ramel says, it's not a strategy, it's buzzwords masquerading as a strategy. Well, take your buzzwords and stick it into large language model, which is really designed to identify flows of logic and ask, does this make any sense? And then be prepared to live with their result. And especially say, take the jargon out, take the buzzwords out, what is this really saying? You know, one the things I like to do is say, write this in grade seven level.
Derek:Maybe a little lower than that, but sometimes it kind of takes some of the It dumbs it down too much, but explain it to me like I'm 10, explain it to me like I'm 12. Yeah. And then you can then the logic's kind of revealed and you go, well, that doesn't, you know, that doesn't hold up. So be critical of your work, get some help with that. There probably are some tools, certainly I'm working on some that will help you think it through.
Derek:But thinking and writing that's done by the leader is more valuable than anything else. So if you want some help thinking and writing, definitely find us at Unconstrained and we can guide you through that. But don't expect that we're gonna write your reports for you.
Bryn:AI could be another episode at some point too because you're right. There's there's a lot of benefits to it and then there's some things you gotta be careful of and that kind of thing. But we don't have enough time. We're kinda out already.
Derek:That's right, Brandon. Well, thanks for letting me go on today.
Bryn:Well, I I think you brought up some great points as always. And you know what? It's the one thing that I I've enjoyed since this is episode one twenty. First and foremost, can you believe that? 120 episodes.
Bryn:Yeah. But out of every episode, I see something that I do or do not do, and that's very helpful to me. So we'll just continue on. Let's wrap this baby up.
Derek:Okay. Well, thanks very much. Brain Griffiths is with Mighty Mouth Communications. I'm Derek Hudson with Unconstrained. You can find us at getunconstrained.com And thanks very much for listening to the Essential Dynamics podcast.
Derek:And please first of all consider your request. And if you consider enough, maybe you should write something down about it.