Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!
Welcome to the Essential Dynamics podcast. I'm Derek Hudson. Essential Dynamics is a framework I've been developing to help us work through our trickiest opportunities. And in the podcast, we test the concepts of essential dynamics through deep conversations with interesting people. And I'm thrilled today to have doctor Marvin Washington on the podcast with me.
Derek:I think Marvin's a really interesting person. Happy to have run into him a number of years ago. So, really quick bio Marvin can fill us in, but he's a professor of management at Portland State University. But more importantly, he's the incoming Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Alberta, and Marvin was a professor in the School of Business at the U of A when when I met him, and I'm an alumnus. And also, full disclosure, I'm probably the newest, least experienced, and most part time sessional lecture at the School of Business.
Derek:And so Doctor Washington will be like my boss's boss's boss's boss, and I don't even know how many levels that is. Anyway, Marvin, welcome to, the podcast.
Marvin:Thanks for having me. Yes.
Derek:So so excited that, like, you're coming back to Edmonton. How cool is that?
Marvin:Yeah. It's actually really exciting for me. It's it's one of those things where time sort of, makes no sense. Because on one hand I was gone about two years ago, which sort of feels like twenty years ago, but at the same time feels like yesterday. And I've been sort of processing what does it mean to move back to Edmonton, you know, July 2023, knowing that at that point, I would have left Edmonton roughly July 2021.
Marvin:Right. Yeah.
Derek:Right. Well, it's, fantastic that you thought to, to put your name in and more fantastic that the the wise people in university selected you to come back. Really interested to see what's gonna happen.
Marvin:Yeah. It's such a great opportunity. I mean, the university is really trying to take seriously one of the biggest challenges at universities, which is siloed thinking. We have individual faculties, art, education, engineering, medicine, you name it, and they have their own leadership structure. And so then they try to be self sufficient, which makes sense, but then that self sufficiency often gets in the way of any kind of a cross faculty collaboration.
Marvin:And all of a sudden they say, Let's put in college deans to sort of create a structure that's gonna push cross faculty collaboration. And then they put them in places that made sense. And so the professional programs of law and business sort of make sense, The accreditation programs of like education, accounting, and law make sense. And then you think about arts, just about all of those programs, you want to have a strong arts background in a variety of different, majors and programs that are almost like, connecting to that education, sociology, political science, and then the arts itself, you know, with, that sort of makes sense to start thinking creatively about how can we build partnership, meaningful partnerships, meaningful ways to collaborate and not get caught up in the bureaucracy of who gets the credit hours, who's teaching it, who gets to say this person was in this major or not because no one thinks about that when you leave university. No one really asks you sort of which specific class you took this from.
Marvin:They're just interested in what do you know and what you can do.
Derek:Well, I'm really, excited about that. So essential dynamics really is a way of, starting into systems thinking. And one of the things that, that I've found is I've explored it and looked at situations I've been involved in and talked to people is, you know, the human tendency whenever we run into something complex is we is we break it down. Break it down, assign it out, and immediately begin to suboptimize. And even even in, even in the disciplines that are studied in the School of Business, it's all broken down and sub optimized.
Derek:And so I'm part of a little bit of an experiment because, my accounting, or sorry, my major in my undergrad was accounting. I got my chartered account designation. I'm also a certified management consultant, and I've been working in management and strategy and leadership as as a executive and as a consultant. And now I'm back at the faculty business teaching business law with, with a experienced business law teacher who wanted to get more of a business approach to this course on entrepreneurship and business law.
Marvin:No. Sounds fascinating.
Derek:All of the stuff that, I'm interested in is the intersection of all those things. So
Marvin:No. You said it about the desire to break things down into smaller pieces. There is this, like, it's it's part icebreaker, but part, like, consulting exercise that you may have actually done. You would have the individuals in the room and they each get a piece of a picture that tells the story, and they can't show other people their pictures, but they have to put them in order to tell the story. You start with 40 people each with their own picture and three minutes in, you end up with 10 groups of four, because once I find the person whose picture is next to mine on either side, I'm done.
Marvin:I understand my part of the story. Yeah. And you'll literally be in a room and you'll see one big circle of 40 turn into 10 circles of four. And in the next hour before they finally realize that the goal is for the four to talk to another four, to talk to another four. But the comfort is I found the pictures that look like mine will just stay here and we'll let someone else figure it out.
Marvin:And that to me is, like you said, what systems thinking is trying to do is to say, it's one picture, it's not 10 small pictures, it's one picture. How do we not lose sight of the one picture?
Derek:Well, I have this experience more than once when I I meet with a potential client or a new organization, and I ask them to tell me about what they do and why they're there and what's going on. And if I ask for documentation, almost guarantee the first piece of paper they give me is the org chart. Yes. Which I call the, like, silo chart. And this is this is how we don't have to think about the whole organization, and they hand it out.
Derek:And and so I'm, so let me let me just back up a little bit because I wanna jump into your stuff. So essential dynamics is, a way of thinking about the things that we do in a systematic way by forming it up with the idea of a quest. So we're on an epic quest, and epic quests are only meaningful because we have a really important purpose, and we have to accomplish that on the face of opposition. And the other the other parts of that I look at is that there's the people who are involved in the quest, and the journey that they have to take. So I just reduced that to people, path, and purpose.
Derek:Mhmm.
Marvin:Mhmm.
Derek:And then, for each of those, I'm looking at the opposition or the dynamic forces that you face. So on the purpose side, there are conflicting purposes that we have to deal with, which we call purpose x and purpose y. On the past side, there's things that drive us forward, and there are things that hold us back, which we call drivers and constraints. And then on the people side, the way I've, come to understand that is each of us is an individual who wants to be true to ourselves, but we also wanna be part of a group. So that's that's the way I look at a lot of things.
Derek:So I, I picked up, your book, Leads Lead Self First Before Leading Others. I've got another book, which I'll probably reference, which is, similar title. I can't remember right now because it sounds so much like this one. Lea Leading Self or something like that, I think it's called. Which I I totally understand and and acknowledge that principle, and I was interested in seeing that.
Derek:But then when I got into your book, I'm seeing a lot about multiple purposes, drivers and constraints, certainly certainly the importance of defining one's purpose. And then the other thing was this idea that you could have a plan for your life that was a model that was separate from from what you actually do, which then allows you to work on it. And there's a recent podcast about four or five ago with my partner, Ann McTaggart, where we talked about the business model and, business model is the boss. And so I started to read this, and I think, like, where did Marvin and I touch how did Marvin and I touch the same source? And let me get Marvin on Mhmm.
Derek:And have him explain it better than I've done so far. So, I'm gonna leave it to you to figure out where to start. But systems thinking, leadership, Marvin's wisdom, go.
Marvin:Yeah. I'll start with probably, like, thirty seconds of a preamble, because that helps understand my thinking on this. Like, why was this even a question for me? Undergrad degree is in engineering and like most engineers back in the eighties, I was so excited to get a job at Procter and Gamble manufacturing Zest Bar Soap, pumps, equipment, electrical, we got something I can get my head around, soap, you see it in the grocery store, but But I'm at Procter and Gamble, you do a good job, you get promoted, you do a good job, you get promoted, you do a good job, you get promoted. I look up five, six years later, I'm not doing any soap stuff anymore, I'm managing people that are managing people that are sort of doing the work And I knew zero about management or leadership.
Marvin:I was an engineer. And so as you, I love your word about this quest, because I think that was my quest to sort of say, well, I guess I gotta figure out what leaders do. Well, what do leaders do? And that sort of took me on this consulting world with some colleagues that used to work at P and G as well. We were doing large scale change, the postal service, the country of Botswana.
Marvin:And we had this like really silly epiphany. The work that people are being asked to do is really hard. So then why are they doing it? And that really became our sort of beginning conversation about purpose. All the low hanging fruit was done twenty years ago.
Marvin:I used to crack this joke with a lot of leaders. And I would say, if you think about your job, it really is to come in and to solve hard problems. Because if the if there were zero problems, we would need these many leaders. We would go back to the Wizard of Oz. One person would run the entire thing.
Marvin:And if you get promoted from solving these hard problems, your reward is what? Harder problems.
Derek:Harder problems.
Marvin:So then before we come as consultants and tell you like, here's the easy philosophy or just do that. We wanted to stop and have people really internalized, why are they raising their hand to solve these problems? And in some cases, they begged us to solve these problems. And this is me talking to myself. I raised my hand to be the college Dean.
Marvin:I interviewed, I filled out paperwork. I met with people. And in all the interviews, I'm pretty sure I didn't say I'm an average worker. I'm pretty sure I tried to convince everyone I'm a hard worker, I can work with difficult people, I can get a task done in uncertainty. Like I begged for this job in some sense, and then I get the job, and what are you and I both here?
Marvin:This is a hard job. Who, who wanted us to do this job? I'm gonna sit here until someone comes in, does the job. So it felt like for me in a lot of, my own moments of clarity, which became sort of my, you know, my work, let me help you get really clear on why are you trying to do this work? So what are you trying to get accomplished?
Marvin:I love your phrase of what's the quest? Cause in some sense, I'm asking you to stop and to think about what quest are you actually on. And it may be different than the quest of the person that had the job before you, Because they may have similar goals or similar deliverables, but different paths, different people involved in getting that done. And I think it's easy to not think about it. We have people that come into work excited and then they become, unexcited and then they become negatively excited, right, trying to make bad things.
Marvin:Well, how does that happen? They forget the quest. Yeah. They forget what connected them to it in the first place.
Derek:One of the reasons the quest resonated with me, was because it legitimizes it being hard.
Marvin:Yeah.
Derek:And you can't you can't say in the middle of an epic quest, hey, just a second here. This is hard because that's the whole definition is to overcome the the challenge. Right? And I I think there's something that's happened in society. Maybe it's because we've become affluent, where it seems to be a better idea to get stuff without the effort.
Derek:Or and maybe it's like, you know, obviously we need to protect vulnerable people, but if we protect all of our people all of the time from, you know, being hurt or having to work hard or being discouraged, then when you get an organization and you get that first promotion and you get the hard question, and then you say, well, that's not what I signed up for. Yeah. I I think there's we've got way more capacity than, we think.
Marvin:And I think and that's why for me, it's such an internal question. Because if I've never thought about what's the quest I'm on, then when I get, I love your phrase, when I get these constraints, when I get these problems, I look to blame someone. I look to, well, I only wanted the cool parts of the job. Someone else is making me do the bad parts. But if I said, and there's other people that say the same thing, all the quests you choose, you almost relish some of the bad because it creates grit, determination.
Marvin:It's a cool story afterwards. I mean, I know people that will do crazy they do hundred mile races. They hate it while they're doing it, but they tell the story of the hundred mile race every time we talk to them. Yeah. No one tells a story about the hundred feet race, right?
Marvin:There's no story there. And so it isn't that I want it easy, but I'm choosing the hard, I'm choosing to go on this path, I'm choosing to find different ways around it. Let's actually stop and think about that for a minute. And it isn't a quick answer as we both know, it isn't a, you know, in twenty minutes I help you figure out why you're doing this. And I think a part of, part of, the struggle now is we don't, we've lost the capacity to sit with difficult questions.
Marvin:Now, as soon as I start to sit with it, I Google it, I YouTube it, I TikTok it, and I think I have the answer because in eighteen seconds, I see a quick in three steps do this. And what we're both saying, what you're saying really wonderfully is that's just not how these quests work. That's not how purposes work. That you won't get it resolved in a twenty five minute, you know, half hour sitcom comedy sitcom. You're gonna get it resolved.
Derek:One of the things that, that you emphasize is a lot of that well, I mean, in your book, because it's about personal leadership, is that inner journey is something you have to go on on your own Yeah. And and nobody can do it for you, and it has to be you just I mean, you have to do the work. And and you and I are both trying to help people do it. Yeah. And and there is definitely the potential for that, but you you can't, you can't outsource this stuff.
Marvin:And this is and again, this is why and and I I know as soon as I bring in sport analogies, people like sport analogies, but this is why so often we bring in sport analogies because no coach can make the player want to play. Yep. If the player doesn't want to play, no coach can make that happen. And we even have a term for it. This player is coachable, which basically means the player wants to do what it takes, then the coach can come in and do wonderful things.
Marvin:We can provide structure. We can provide guiding questions. We can provide, some like prompts to have you stop and think. You have to stop and think, you know, a phrase, and I got this from someone else, and it's a phrase that I use all the time, talking about work is not work. And so often we want to talk about, well, what's purpose?
Marvin:We want to talk about hard problems. Well, yeah, we talked about it. We still need to go and figure out the hard problems. Again, I can talk about the need to go on a 15 kilometer run. I'm only gonna get better if I actually go on the 15 kilometer run.
Derek:Or go on a five kilometer run, throw up Yeah. And then go back out again the next day.
Marvin:Exactly. Yeah. And and I'm totally okay with all the reasons why, but but if you're at work, hopefully no one has told you it's going to be easy. Hopefully. So assuming no one told you it was going to be easy, your question is, why are you choosing this hard work?
Marvin:Because you can go do something else, but that something else will be hard as well.
Derek:Also be hard too. And it's also hard to not have, not have a meaningful purpose, not have financial resources. That's hard too.
Marvin:And that to me is the sad part. The sad part is, you know, again, if I had a better word, I'd use it. It's the walking zombies. It's the people that really go from pain to pleasure. They, this feels good, do more of this, this sucked, so I left that because so much potential there and they're not even utilizing it.
Marvin:They're not, they're not cap they're not capitalizing on the inner potential inside of them. I don't I I I it's not for me to decide where to put your effort. My wish is that you put effort.
Derek:Right. So one of the things I found interesting about where worlds overlap is for for the last about six months, I've, started to understand, the power I've seen of having a model. And, we had some recent podcasts about it. I blogged about it. I'm I'm helping my clients with it.
Derek:And one of the things I've kinda realized is, if you're a manager and you don't have a hypothesis, you're not really managing. Like a scientist needs a hypothesis. A manager says, if we do this, we'll be successful. And then either you do that or you don't do that. And if you don't follow your plan, you can't judge the plan.
Derek:You better just follow the plan. If you follow the plan and you don't get the results, then you can tweak the plan. And when people, as a as a financial person trying to help people forecasting, they think it's about passively predicting the future. And I say, no. You tell me the chain of events that's gonna cause the outcome, and if you don't like the outcome, you don't have to rate that in the forecast.
Derek:You go back and you change your decisions so that you can expect something better, and then you see what happens, and then you adjust it even further. That's management in my mind. So I think what what you're saying when when you suggest that someone would put a life plan in place is that they would take, responsibility for the life to the point where they'd have a model. Yeah. And, and then they could adjust the model as opposed to just, like, doing random stuff.
Derek:Is that right?
Marvin:You're you're you're right on. And I we we try to be clear. A life plan is not a contract. It's a starting place for a conversation. So I love your phrase of hypothesis.
Marvin:You're going to sit for a moment of clarity. You're gonna say, if I can imagine a world in five years, what might that world look like? And then there's a series of prompts, physical, financial, you know, family, vocational, spiritual, community, these are just prompts if you think about that world. To me, the power of that is so that when you're living your life and changes happen, you have something to bounce off of. So again, back to me, the irony is before a month before I put my name in to be the college Dean, I was having dinner with friends saying I wasn't going back to Edmonton because we had a plan.
Marvin:We had a plan, me and my wife, about what life was gonna look like, and then it felt like out of nowhere this new opportunity came up. Well, the first thing I did was pull out the plan and then had a wonderful conversation with myself. What about this new opportunity can help me reach my plan better, different, quicker? And then what parts of my plan do I need to talk about and think about to take advantage of the opportunity? So it's both, it's not on the plan getting rid of it, but it's also never need a plan, just do whatever comes in front of me.
Marvin:The life plan is a way to have that conversation. And now my wife has one as well. So you can imagine I had the conversation, she had the conversation, and then we had the conversation. It took a while for us to get to that level of conversation so that we're not reacting emotionally, because guess what? Our world is going to change come July of twenty twenty three when I'm in a much bigger role, much more expansive role, we're in another city, it's a change to her, a change to our three year old son, it becomes really easy to start pointing the fingers and they start saying, well, you told me this and you No, we sat and had talked about it.
Marvin:Change happens and change will always happen unexpected, unintended, but it's a process, it's a model to have the conversation about that. And that's the part to me that's really exciting about something like a life plan.
Derek:So you've introduced this to, all kinds of other people. Have you seen any other successes maybe that you could share? Yeah. Or describe or disguise or something?
Marvin:And so I this is usually my, I'll describe it in a minute. This is usually my third cup of coffee when I do coaching clients. And so I'll take on a, a person I'm coaching and we always plan in terms of three cups of coffee. The first meeting, let's figure out what the issue is that you think why you need coaching. The second meeting, let's then talk about if that's really the issue or not the issue, because as you can imagine, they'll say things like, I got a bad team, was it really the bad team or is it something about leadership?
Marvin:And then the third meeting is let's now locate your work into the other parts of your life. Let's now locate how you are leading this organization into the parts of your life or how you're leading yourself, how you are a member of your family, how you are carving out time for other things. So that's what this document helps for. And I find again, amazing resistance because people have this, if I write it down, that means it's real. I don't wanna write it down.
Marvin:And I'll say something to the effect of, this is the one place where a half ass answer is better than no ass answer. Like write something down, put it in pencil, I don't care because it's the reflection on the document that's more important than actually what you write down. So you need to, you need to get it out of you on paper. And then the other side that I get is this sort of, I can't predict the future conversation. And I'm like, but we're not predicting the future, we're imagining the future.
Marvin:And when I can get clients to get there, they'll reach cool insights. I've had usually clients get less I was looking for, the anxiety goes away because they recognize what they're trying to do is hard. So I'm the CEO of a company, we were tasked with doubling sales and then they get there in two weeks and go, this is hard. Well, yeah, doubling sales is really, really hard. So that's usually what I mean by the anxiety.
Marvin:I call it the second stress. Work is stressful, but sometimes we get stressed over the stress of work. Right. Yeah. And so having a plan helps us with the second stress.
Marvin:So I'm not nervous because I haven't found a magical way to double sales in two seconds. If it was that easy, the last person would've figured it out. They want you to figure it out because it's hard work. So then do the work of figuring it out. And that's what the plan helps you with.
Marvin:It helps you think that through. I've had more, I've had many sort of leaders be reminded that they're in a relationship with someone and that if they're doing a work plan that doesn't include a family plan, that's the easiest way to make your current partner your last partner. Yeah. And so whatever work plan you need, how does this connect to your family plan? And on both sides, I've had work plans that say, you know what?
Marvin:I had a wonderful conversation with my partner and because of this, we both realized I'm gonna be putting in fifteen hour days. So we've had to readjust our family so I can put in fifteen hour days. I've had other people say, You know, I thought about this, I don't wanna put in fifteen hour days. So I'd had the different conversation about work and everything else. You went on both sides, but why not have those meaningful conversations?
Marvin:Again, I go back to your, let's get clear on the quest. Let's get clear on where we're going and who we're going with.
Derek:Hey, Marvin. This is fantastic. And as I told you, the last twenty minutes took six minutes of, percet perceived time, and we're at we we've run out of time. So, we're gonna have to do this again real soon, surprisingly soon. And, so just to just to pull it together, you're saying that the life plan helps you get the sense of the quest and then put some stuff down about the journey, which allows you to think about it, talk about it, act on it, which may not be how the journey turns out.
Derek:In fact, it probably won't be.
Marvin:Exactly right. It gives you a moment as I tell people, it gives you a moment in time of clarity so that when life comes at you, you can bounce it off of something. You can have a discussion about something. To avoid what so many of us do is run from pain to pleasure.
Derek:Well, when I and I have to say, I don't think I've thought of it that way, but I have to say that in my own imaginings about my future, and my planning, and my scenarios, and stuff like that, from time to time, I've had a moment of clarity, which has then later happened Yes. To a consistent enough degree where I know what I'm gonna do because I've been there in my mind anyway.
Marvin:Exactly. And it
Derek:and it's a way to get through that scenario and continue on the quest.
Marvin:You got it. Yep.
Derek:Okay. Hey, Marvin. Thanks very much. If people are interested in your work, how can they find you?
Marvin:Yep. So the easiest way is if you Googled Marvin Washington, you'll find me on my, I have a website there. Just make sure you look for a professor or doctor Marvin Washington, because there is a football player named Marvin Washington. I'm not that person.
Derek:You're not that guy? You wish you were, but you're not. Okay. Yeah.
Marvin:That person's like six, seven, two hundred and ninety pounds or something. That's not me.
Derek:Okay. So, we'll we'll put the links to your actual website in our show notes. This podcast is brought to you by Get Unconstrained they're by Unconstrained in our website, getunconstrained.com. We'll also put those notes in. The guy you'll find if you Google me, Derek Hudson, is a famous portrait photographer.
Derek:I do landscapes. That's the only reason I'm not as as famous as him for my photography. So, thanks everyone for listening. Please, continue to engage with us on our podcast and, and contact either of us if you're interested. Bryn, Griffis, thanks for your help with the production.
Derek:I'm Derek Hudson. Until next time, consider your quest.