Reinvent Your Organisation with Sam Spurlin The Ready - OrgDev Episode 12

Our latest video is an interview with Sam Spurlin, consultant at The Ready (founded by Aaron Dignan, author of Brave New Work).  We explore practical strategies and insights with Sam for shaping the future of work.

The Ready are on a mission to revolutionise the work landscape envisioning a future that is more human, adaptive, meaningful, and equitable. In this conversation, Sam sheds light on The Ready's proactive approach to fostering a diverse and inclusive environment. 

Join us as we explore Sam's journey to becoming a trailblazer in organisational transformation. Sam shares valuable insights and practical tips for cultivating a workplace culture that embraces diversity and empowers all employees to reach their full potential.

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That’s why each week in our Next Step to Better newsletter, we’re sharing From Pod to Practice – a 2-page visual summary of each episode designed to help you take the learning from the podcast and into your work.

You’ll get:
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About Us

We’re Dani and Garin – Organisation Development (OD) practitioners who help leaders and people professionals tackle the messiness of organisational life. We focus on building leadership capability, strengthening team effectiveness, and designing practical, systemic development programmes that help you deliver on your team and organisational goals. We also offer coaching to support individual growth and change.

Find out more at www.distinction.live

We'd love to connect with you on Linked In:
linkedin.com/in/danibacon478
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garinrouch

Transcript

WEBVTT

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Hi, and welcome to the Dev podcast. So many of our workplaces

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are broken, dehumanizing, and held back by bureaucracy,

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but it cannot be reinvented in the service of human flourishing

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and achieving outstanding results. So we're absolutely delighted and excited

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to have Sam Sperling, partner of the Ready, as our guest.

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So the ready is a leading organization development and design

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consultancy, and it's on a mission to challenge our assumptions about

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how work can be done. Now, you will have heard of the ready before,

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either through their groundbreaking book, brave new work by Aaron

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Dignion, or their podcast at work with the ready. They're probably best

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described as the consultants consultancy. So they're looked up by the

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profession as sort of setting the standard of what can be achieved.

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And they tackle a whole range of challenges in organizations through their operating system approach.

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And interestingly, they've got a vision of how HR can support a new type of

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culture, building one where HR leads the way in creating

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an operating model for a truly great people first organization.

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So Sam combines great experience and a thought provoking view

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on how organizations should work. But not only is a great consultant create meaningful

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and significant change in organizations, he's actually a really interesting guy. You probably

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know him as the co host of my favorite od podcast

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at work with the ready. So I've got to keep a lid on my excitement

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today. But he's also fascinated by the intersection of personal

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development, organization design and philosophy. He's got

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his roots in positive psychology. And interestingly, he also does a podcast

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about the nature of work with his farmer brother Max called

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Fields of Work. And that's where they contrast two very different lifestyles

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and look at the similarities and differences as well. Interestingly, he's also

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a researcher for the iconic book getting things done,

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revised edition with David Allen. And outside of work, he's training for a

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triathlon. Is that right, Sam? And you recently completed your first half, Ironman and

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still alive to tell the story. I did, yeah, I did that

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last fall. Congratulations. Thank you

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so much for joining us, Sam.

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That was a hell of an introduction. I'm going to make sure I have a

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copy of that recording and use it anytime in the future when

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I need to introduce the ready or myself. So thank you for doing that

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for me. You can hire me for weddings, anything.

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Good to know. Brilliant. Welcome, Sam. Lovely to have you. So, as Garen

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said, part of what we do the podcast is demystifying organization development a

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bit. So if you can kick off, just tell us a bit about what you

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do. What does your role involve. How do you work with organizations?

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Sure. So at the ready, we work with

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lots of different types of organizations, but often they are

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some of the largest and most bureaucratic organizations

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in the world. And what we are trying to do at

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the end of the day is build a capacity

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for organizations to change themselves. We firmly

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believe that no consulting project has an endpoint

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where we can just kind of like wipe our hands and say, yep, you're done.

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We got you to the point that you need to get to. And that's not

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because we want to be around forever. In fact, we actually are quite anxious to

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wrap up a project. But it's because we believe that there

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is no kind of final end state to organizations being in a more effective

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state. It's more about their ability to consistently sense and

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respond to what is happening around them and be able to

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change themselves to better match what they need to be able

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to do. That's kind of the high level of what the work looked

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like, you know, down into the weeds. We can, we can definitely spend some time

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there, but it looks like team coaching, individual coaching

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as well, with leaders, a lot of workshops, a lot

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of facilitation, things of that nature.

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So that's quite different. The model is quite different to a lot of traditional consultancies

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with that kind of land and expand model where they kind of, they get in

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and then they want to do more and more and more. So what drives you

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to do this thing so differently? Where does that come from? I mean, I think

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on the one hand, it's just a

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true desire to impact as many organizations

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as possible. So if we're

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able to get an organization to a point where that engine

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has been kick started and it will continue without us, then we can

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feel good about putting our attention to a

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new client, to a new organization. And I think there's also

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just an element of intellectual honesty around,

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like what we actually believe requires what is required

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for the work to go well. And don't get me wrong, a lot of these

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organizations are so large that there's plenty of kind of

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landing and expanding to do, and not from

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a just maximize revenue point of view, but when you're

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talking about a hundred thousand person organization, that's almost like a nation,

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like we can, we can do some work here, we can do some work over

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here, we can do some work over here and hopefully kind of connect

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those different areas together to

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make them all greater than the sum of their parts.

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Great. And I guess so one of the things that obviously we both have

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read the book brave new work. And one of the things that hits you and

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is reinforcing the website is you have an operating canvas.

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And that kind of is a bit of a blueprint about how you sort of

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perceive organizations. Just for those being introduced to the ready

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for the first time, can you just give us a bit of a high level

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view of what is the canvas and why is it a particular approach for

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working with organizations? So we use the metaphor of an

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operating system in our work quite a bit. And the thing

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to understand about an operating system on your computer or on your

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phone, any computing device that you use is that everything you interact

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with that device rides on top of that

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operating system, but you are not generally interacting directly

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with the operating system. So the stuff that you see and feel rides

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on top of that operating system. So if we think about bringing that idea to

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an organization, there is a whole,

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there are practices and principles and beliefs that

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we have about how the organization works that

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we very rarely interact with directly, but based on what

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we believe about those things, that manifests in how

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we actually experience the organization. So the OS

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canvas, or the operating system canvas that you referred to, is our

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attempt at trying to shine a light into what

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is historically a pretty black box around what

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is organizational culture, what are the various places

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where we have decisions to make. So the canvas

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is twelve fields, and those fields represent

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things like purpose, or meetings,

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or resources, or strategy or structure.

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And the canvas itself is really a value neutral

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tool. You could think of the most messed up, hierarchical,

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broken organization in the world, and you can use the canvas to understand

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what about that organization is so

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challenging or is so, so negative. Or you can use the OS canvas

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to brainstorm or develop the most

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progressive organization in the world. But really, those parts of the canvas

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are areas for us to think about and be

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deliberate about how, what do we believe about these things?

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What is the role of purpose in our organization?

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What do we believe about meetings and

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our meeting culture. And the canvas just gives us basically

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twelve different lenses to look at the organization

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through and see what that brings up in terms of

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valuable conversations or interventions that we might want to

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experiment with. That's fascinating, isn't it? Because I guess when people have

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been in an organization for quite some time, they become institutionalized, and you're

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trying to sort of make explicit what just is normal to other

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people as well. I mean, the metaphor I've been using recently

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with using the OS canvas with teams

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is something along the lines of organizational

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echolocation. So you think about bats and how bats

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can use echolocation to see in pitch dark.

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And what I think we are sometimes trying to do in our work through

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the OS canvas and through just this idea of the operating system is to give

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people echolocation that allows them to see their organization

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differently for the first time. Potentially,

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when you really have internalized this idea of an operating system in

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these twelve different fields of where things are happening,

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you start to, I think, see the tensions,

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the challenges in your organization with

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a lot more nuance and a lot more specificity,

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which I think then leads to a lot more potential

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levers to actually pull or experiment with to change things.

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Great. I can imagine it's provoked some incredibly

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important conversations and organizations that you've worked with where

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it's almost naming the unnameable. Absolutely. I mean,

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I think one of the main things, and really the

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origin story of the ready involves this,

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the organizational kind of restructuring that everybody has

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experienced in many large organizations.

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Leaders getting into a room, deciding that we're going to change the chart and that's

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going to fix our problems. And although structure is a

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part of the operating system, like, it's undoubtedly very important. The way

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what we believe about our structure and how we are structured influences lots of

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different things. What the OS canvas has allowed

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me to have many conversations with leaders about is

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perhaps what you are experiencing as a structure challenge

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is actually being caused by something else in the OS.

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Perhaps we're actually talking about a lack of clarity around authority,

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or maybe our approach to information or workflow.

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Maybe that's where the tension actually lives. Why don't we start

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there? Because there's often interventions to be done,

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experiments to be done in the information field or workflow,

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or meetings or authority that are far less

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disruptive than structure. So very rarely

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do we go to structure. First we try to play with some other levers

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that may actually solve what feels like a structure problem,

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and then only later on come to structure as a

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place to do some changing. You could see us nodding there.

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So it happens in America as well, in the UK. Oh yes.

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Oh yes. It's kind of reassuring, but not reassuring.

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Okay. I was interested in terms of where do

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you begin as well, because obviously there's twelve elements to the,

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to the operating system that you talk about, and there's all

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of them. It's almost like a menu where all the courses look really

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nice. And does choosing where to begin really matter,

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or does it just get started and see what emerges? It's more so

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getting started, but I have certainly perceived a pattern

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of just getting started often looks very similar across lots

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of organizations. So that column that

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includes workflow, meetings and information

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is a very common place where we originally, where we'll

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start doing some work, primarily meetings,

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because they're so visible and they are so

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central to how people experience the

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organization and everything from resources to

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strategy to information. It all kind of happens in what

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we call meetings. And that was true,

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pretty pandemic, and is, I think, even more

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true now in a more hybrid, kind of remote first work,

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where scheduled meetings is basically where almost

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all of the work happens. So if you're looking

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to change the dynamic of an organization,

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then what we should be doing is looking for where interactions

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are happening. And nowadays, most interactions are happening in

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scheduled meetings. So are we bringing the care of

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thought and planning and really kind of interrogating what

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we want these moments to be like?

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Most organizations haven't thought that much about it. We just like hop on a call

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and we have a meeting, and the leader has brought an agenda, or maybe not,

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and we'll figure it out from there. There's so much

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more nuance that is available to us if

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we think really carefully about what do we want meetings to be like.

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So we often will start there. Yeah, and it's really interesting because there was a

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ready podcast that you did fairly recently, which was about meetings.

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And if you don't get meetings right, then organizations

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are systems and they'll find a workaround. The organization still has to

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function. So if people aren't able to make good decisions or exchange perspectives,

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then things like the one to ones will all become the

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way of doing things as well. Yeah, exactly. We had this whole

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episode, which was,

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we decided to talk about it based on some experiences I was having with a

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client where they had just very much what I would call a one on one

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culture. So everybody was having one on ones with everybody else all the time.

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And through one lens, you could say that's

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a positive thing. Generally, one on one meetings

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are placed to build relationships, and we get to have potentially

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have relatively frank conversations with each other.

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But what I noticed is that this

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series of one on ones was really just a workaround, as you mentioned,

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for a broken operating rhythm,

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that conversations that really ought to be happening

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with the team were happening individually.

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And yeah, there's just all sorts of interesting challenges that were emerging

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from treating one on ones as the only way of getting

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work done. And I think maybe the main thing is that we then

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this organization was not using one on one for what they're actually

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good for, which is the coaching and development and the relationship

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building stuff instead. So, yeah, there's a lot there.

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I mean, I always talk about how it can seem trite

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or maybe overly simplistic to be spending

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so much time talking about meetings. And we always kind of have to

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walk a delicate line to make sure we don't just become,

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like, the good meeting facilitators within organizations.

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Like, yes, we are great meeting facilitators, and meetings are really important,

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but it's always in service of the larger

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game, which is actually changing how the organization works.

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Yeah, I think that links to a question I was going to ask you.

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How open are the people who commission you to do work to starting

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somewhere else? So if they come to you and they've kind of got a restructure

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in their heads, how open are they to starting, maybe on meetings?

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And how do you navigate that? Generally, pretty open to.

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I mean, partially that's just our contracting process. Like, if someone is looking

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to hire a consultancy that is just going to come in and tell them how

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to restructure, that's not going to be us. So we'll

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kind of filter each other out before we get to that point.

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I think a lot of times, leaders,

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they only know the reorg, and they're actually

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very open to the idea of perhaps we can get

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the results that we're looking for in a less disruptive way.

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They, they know it's often quite disruptive. They know that, you know,

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doing a reorg creates a ton of churn beforehand while everybody's

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wondering what the reorg is going to be a ton of churn afterward, while we're

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all trying to figure out what our new teams are. And just as we are

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starting to get into a new rhythm, the new rumors of the next reorg

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are coming down. So, like, it's, it's generally not a hard,

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hard case to make that. Let's, let's, let's put, put a

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pause on that. We can always come back to it. Let's try to get at

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the tensions in a more direct and less

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disruptive way first and see what happens. Fascinate.

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And what we always ask everyone who comes on is, what was

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your journey into this field? One of the commonalities is that often

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people, this either finds them or they sort of find its second career.

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What was your journey into this field? Yeah, so originally,

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the plan was to be a high school history and economics teacher.

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So that's what I went to undergrad to do, and,

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you know, graduated into a time when it was tough to find a full time

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teaching job. So I was substitute teaching for about a

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year and a half. And during that time, I had been just writing online

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about personal development, stuff that I found interesting.

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Ultimately realized what I had been writing about was this

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academic discipline called positive psychology, which is basically

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the focus on the

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positive end of the kind of human experience continuum

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as it relates to psychology. So things like happiness,

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meaning flow, things of that nature. So ultimately decided

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to go to grad school with a vague sense of doing something with positive

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psychology, not really sure what. And then once I got there,

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realized there was a program that was specifically about applying positive

17:11.356 --> 17:14.796
psychology to organizations. So that was the initial kind

17:14.820 --> 17:18.012
of foray into how can we make

17:18.108 --> 17:22.093
organizations a place of human flourishing and

17:22.173 --> 17:26.061
not a dour prison

17:26.117 --> 17:29.773
sentence for many folks. So that was my

17:29.813 --> 17:33.221
initial foray into this, and then through that program

17:33.317 --> 17:36.917
and into my PhD work, which I eventually withdrew from,

17:36.965 --> 17:40.549
but for a while, was really deep into looking

17:40.621 --> 17:44.333
at alternative ways of organizing. So I was

17:44.373 --> 17:48.555
looking at solopreneurs and independent workers and freelancers, and through

17:48.749 --> 17:53.328
that research, became aware of sociocracy

17:53.376 --> 17:56.592
and holocracy and self management and all

17:56.608 --> 18:00.328
of the kind of case organizations.

18:00.376 --> 18:04.472
Morningstar, Bertzor, WL Gore, things like

18:04.648 --> 18:07.848
that became really fascinating to me, and that was

18:07.896 --> 18:12.296
really my entree into this type of organizational

18:12.360 --> 18:15.284
consulting. Wow, that's quite a pathway, isn't it?

18:15.824 --> 18:19.816
Absolutely, yeah, for sure.

18:20.000 --> 18:23.280
And there's. Yeah. So now, you know, now I've been at the ready for

18:23.352 --> 18:26.224
a little over, like eight and a half years or so, something like that,

18:26.264 --> 18:29.680
since 2015, whatever that math works out to being.

18:29.832 --> 18:32.884
So your employee number. Oh, sorry, partner number.

18:33.344 --> 18:37.136
Yeah, employee number one. So, you know, Aaron originally started it,

18:37.240 --> 18:40.648
invited me to join as employee number

18:40.696 --> 18:44.384
one. So have have been around since the. We call it the panera

18:44.424 --> 18:47.640
days because he and I, we didn't have an office. We just go to Panera

18:47.792 --> 18:51.496
and work from there in New

18:51.520 --> 18:54.832
York on it, doesn't it? Yeah, it should.

18:54.888 --> 18:57.896
Right. Well, we got a little ways

18:57.920 --> 19:01.976
to go, maybe before panera will honor us as our first

19:02.080 --> 19:05.200
unofficial office. But, you know, it's important to have

19:05.232 --> 19:08.472
goals. Absolutely. Be on that New York walking tour very soon.

19:08.608 --> 19:12.120
Yeah, of course. So, what does a typical week look

19:12.152 --> 19:15.192
like for you? Is there a typical week? Yeah,

19:15.248 --> 19:18.998
there's. I mean, I would say not a super typical week,

19:19.046 --> 19:22.446
but let's do this in real time. Why don't I open

19:22.470 --> 19:25.434
up my calendar and I'll give you the sense of what.

19:26.014 --> 19:29.434
At least this week for me, is like.

19:30.334 --> 19:34.342
Generally, the way the ready does

19:34.478 --> 19:38.094
our work is that we try to have a duo of consultants

19:38.174 --> 19:41.734
who are focused on no more than two clients

19:41.894 --> 19:45.494
at a time. In a perfect world, what we call our

19:45.654 --> 19:49.510
full time transformations is that we actually have at least two consultants

19:49.582 --> 19:53.270
fully dedicated to the, which is great

19:53.342 --> 19:57.310
when we can make that happen, because you limit the context switching

19:57.342 --> 20:00.998
and the cognitive overhead of switching between clients.

20:01.086 --> 20:04.390
But I would say that's probably 20,

20:04.462 --> 20:08.158
30% of our projects right now, I'm across a couple

20:08.286 --> 20:11.790
of different projects, and when I'm really on top

20:11.822 --> 20:15.462
of my game, I'm able to keep one client

20:15.558 --> 20:19.858
per day. That pretty quickly

20:20.026 --> 20:24.050
gets less feasible just because

20:24.122 --> 20:27.210
of trying to schedule things with folks. You got to take

20:27.282 --> 20:30.370
things where you can. What I actually will do is more

20:30.402 --> 20:34.018
so the first half of the day client, a second half of the

20:34.026 --> 20:38.234
day will be client b, things like that. Looking at

20:38.354 --> 20:40.174
last week, for example,

20:41.514 --> 20:45.066
with one of my clients, we have a, we're essentially doing a

20:45.090 --> 20:48.186
pilot right now where we have designed a

20:48.330 --> 20:52.042
series of teams and their

20:52.098 --> 20:56.082
operating rhythms to try to interrupt some

20:56.138 --> 20:59.690
organizational patterns that they are struggling with. So we

20:59.722 --> 21:02.954
worked with a team to kind of co design this operating model,

21:02.994 --> 21:06.554
and now we're in this phase of actually piloting these

21:06.594 --> 21:09.754
new ways of working. So we have like four different teams that

21:09.794 --> 21:12.732
have new missions, new rosters,

21:12.828 --> 21:16.388
new ways of working, and we have been initially

21:16.556 --> 21:20.380
facilitating their operating rhythm, so facilitating their weekly meeting

21:20.532 --> 21:23.812
with a specific meeting structure, facilitating their

21:23.868 --> 21:27.116
monthly retrospectives, and turning those retrospective insights

21:27.180 --> 21:30.484
back into specific things for them to

21:30.604 --> 21:34.012
change within their ways of working. And because we

21:34.028 --> 21:38.326
are a few weeks into this, it's, we have kind of shifted our

21:38.470 --> 21:41.902
role from actually holding the facilitation

21:41.998 --> 21:45.662
to team. The actual members of the client team

21:45.758 --> 21:49.190
are facilitating now with our coaching kind of behind the scenes,

21:49.222 --> 21:52.350
and they are very close to not needing our

21:52.462 --> 21:55.790
day to day involvement in those teams.

21:55.822 --> 21:59.134
And then we will shift our focus

21:59.214 --> 22:02.598
kind of one level up. So, like, now that each of these teams are

22:02.646 --> 22:05.974
on a pretty healthy cadence, what does it look like

22:06.014 --> 22:09.150
for the connective tissue between these, between these

22:09.182 --> 22:13.374
teams to be improved? What are the various venues

22:13.494 --> 22:17.414
and tools and everything else that are

22:17.454 --> 22:21.286
required to be working really well for this pilot to happen? Because it's not

22:21.310 --> 22:25.542
about these four teams working in silos, it's about these four teams really intersecting

22:25.638 --> 22:29.674
and getting after this work in a new way. So that's one

22:30.094 --> 22:33.342
area of work. So that specifically to

22:33.358 --> 22:37.746
your question last week, a handful of facilitating some meetings,

22:37.930 --> 22:41.818
a working session with kind of our core team around some

22:41.906 --> 22:44.610
stuff that we're planning on doing later in the month,

22:44.722 --> 22:48.338
some workshops, and then I have, it looks like a couple of one on

22:48.386 --> 22:52.426
one coaching sessions with leaders in

22:52.450 --> 22:55.770
this work where they are super on board

22:55.842 --> 22:59.258
with what we're trying to do, but also understanding

22:59.306 --> 23:02.954
that there is some unlearning that they have to do for

23:02.994 --> 23:06.834
this way of working to work at a really fundamental

23:06.874 --> 23:10.538
level, we are trying to push a lot of authority and decision making

23:10.586 --> 23:14.506
power into these teams that used to reside kind

23:14.530 --> 23:17.650
of strictly within that individual leader.

23:17.762 --> 23:21.386
And they, on the one hand, are very excited to not

23:21.450 --> 23:25.098
be the kind of the solo decision maker on a bunch of things and

23:25.146 --> 23:28.506
also living in that discomfort of having a team

23:28.570 --> 23:32.226
potentially make different decisions than they would

23:32.410 --> 23:35.648
in that they would in the past. So there's a

23:35.656 --> 23:38.688
lot of individual stuff to kind of work through in that.

23:38.736 --> 23:42.464
So I don't know if I answered your question to the appropriate level of specificity,

23:42.504 --> 23:46.448
but that's kind of a typical ish week along

23:46.496 --> 23:49.976
with some good chunks of time just for thinking in writing.

23:50.080 --> 23:54.164
There's a lot of creating material that is important

23:55.144 --> 23:58.656
to this work. So I try to, as much as possible, make sure that

23:58.680 --> 24:02.344
I'm not fully booked in meetings every day

24:03.764 --> 24:07.188
from morning to night. That was a brilliant answer. I think

24:07.196 --> 24:09.596
it gives a really good sense of what you get up to and how you

24:09.620 --> 24:13.156
work. I do not mean to offend any previous guests. That's the singular best answer

24:13.180 --> 24:16.364
we've ever had to that question. Well, I mean,

24:16.404 --> 24:19.304
I like you mentioned,

24:20.044 --> 24:23.300
involved with getting things done. I like thinking about

24:23.412 --> 24:27.140
the very granular, what does the work actually look

24:27.172 --> 24:30.584
like? What are the verbs that are attached to what we are doing

24:30.664 --> 24:34.144
here? And getting really specific about those, I think is

24:34.184 --> 24:37.816
actually really. It's really important to be able to

24:37.880 --> 24:41.504
articulate for teams to be able to articulate for themselves. Like what

24:41.544 --> 24:44.920
actually is the next action here? What is the project that we are trying to,

24:44.952 --> 24:48.312
how do we know if we're done those sorts of things? Danny, I had

24:48.328 --> 24:51.192
about five questions fall out of what Sam just shared, but you had a question

24:51.248 --> 24:55.152
to go next. It's fine. You mentioned siloed working and

24:55.168 --> 24:58.248
I think I saw a LinkedIn post from you fairly recently. It might be today

24:58.296 --> 25:02.504
or yesterday, talking about figure out what you can responsibly ignore.

25:02.664 --> 25:05.720
And I love that idea that there's this kind of jewel.

25:05.832 --> 25:08.872
Being curious about what other teams and colleagues are getting up to is great,

25:08.928 --> 25:11.524
but you've got to put some boundaries around that.

25:12.024 --> 25:16.256
Yeah, that was a personal

25:16.360 --> 25:19.808
learning for me about working at the ready. So, you know,

25:19.856 --> 25:23.084
as employee number one early on,

25:23.704 --> 25:27.128
you are completely aware of everything that is going on,

25:27.216 --> 25:30.224
even through the first few hires, you know, 1015.

25:30.344 --> 25:33.700
It's not hard to know, especially in those early days where we were all

25:33.732 --> 25:37.196
working in an office together in New York. I didn't have to figure out

25:37.220 --> 25:41.212
what I had to responsibly ignore because I could be aware of everything and

25:41.228 --> 25:44.852
it wasn't too much. But you get to 2025,

25:44.948 --> 25:48.948
30 folks in an organization, a self managing

25:48.996 --> 25:53.228
organization at that, and you can't carry

25:53.356 --> 25:56.484
that intention forward, of knowing what everyone is

25:56.524 --> 25:59.212
doing at all times, like what every project is doing,

25:59.308 --> 26:03.372
what various internal initiatives are happening. And I noticed

26:03.388 --> 26:07.140
in myself that I was feeling very overwhelmed or out of the

26:07.172 --> 26:10.508
loop a lot of the time and realized

26:10.596 --> 26:14.532
that that's okay. And actually, I should probably be more out of

26:14.548 --> 26:18.092
the loop of more things so that I can focus on the

26:18.108 --> 26:21.500
things that actually do matter. And I think the LinkedIn post that you're

26:21.532 --> 26:25.172
mentioning, though, is that there's a tension

26:25.228 --> 26:29.116
there. There's a potential paradox there. If you take that

26:29.180 --> 26:32.832
intention of figuring out what you can responsibly ignore

26:32.888 --> 26:37.448
to its extreme, then you've created a very siloed

26:37.616 --> 26:40.968
working life for yourself. And if you don't

26:41.016 --> 26:44.536
think about that at all, then you've created complete overwhelm and an utter lack

26:44.560 --> 26:49.040
of focus. So, so much of what's going on in our organizations is identifying

26:49.192 --> 26:52.736
these polarities and then being deliberate about where

26:52.840 --> 26:56.584
you should fall in those continuums and not

26:56.624 --> 26:59.952
just making the decision for once and then riding with that forever.

27:00.008 --> 27:04.138
But it's a continuous kind of recalibration of where

27:04.186 --> 27:07.154
you need to be on these polarities.

27:07.314 --> 27:10.890
Yeah. And you were saying something was really interesting, which is when

27:10.962 --> 27:15.058
managers go through the process of delegating their authority, empower and responsibility and tasks

27:15.106 --> 27:18.906
out there is that really important moment where they start to do

27:18.930 --> 27:21.978
it and they're feeling very vulnerable or anxious or whatever it is,

27:22.106 --> 27:25.642
and it's up to the employees to then grasp that responsibility

27:25.738 --> 27:29.450
that's there. And sometimes it doesn't just naturally go into someone else.

27:29.482 --> 27:33.042
It just kind of can hang there for a little while, can't it? How do

27:33.058 --> 27:36.610
you stack the odds of probability that that will successfully be taken

27:36.682 --> 27:40.386
on by others? Because often you'll hear stories of managers, well, I did, and then

27:40.410 --> 27:42.466
they didn't do it, or they didn't do it as well. So I took it

27:42.490 --> 27:45.698
back, and now I. I take it back more than ever. How do you sort

27:45.706 --> 27:48.498
of help build that scaffolding around those moments?

27:48.666 --> 27:52.754
Yeah. So I think it's really important to treat it like developing

27:52.794 --> 27:55.566
any other skill or capability.

27:55.710 --> 27:59.998
So, you know, you wouldn't. If you have no history of any

28:00.046 --> 28:03.302
sort of athletic endeavor, but decide

28:03.358 --> 28:07.110
that you want to be a marathoner, you don't buy some shoes and go

28:07.142 --> 28:10.630
run 26 miles the next day, you're going to hurt yourself. You're not

28:10.662 --> 28:14.702
going to create an environment where you have really any chance

28:14.798 --> 28:18.638
of that going well. You start

28:18.686 --> 28:22.606
to make very subtle and minor shifts

28:22.670 --> 28:26.766
in how you are approaching this problem space and

28:26.830 --> 28:30.510
seeing how it goes over time. And I think

28:30.702 --> 28:34.254
applying that to the scenario that you just shared

28:34.294 --> 28:37.726
there means that we don't just flip a switch one day

28:37.750 --> 28:41.510
and say, hey, team, you have full decision rights over this

28:41.582 --> 28:45.174
vast landscape of decisions. Good luck. Have fun

28:45.214 --> 28:48.434
with that. It is a hey, team.

28:49.814 --> 28:52.910
This thing that I normally have the decision right over that is

28:52.942 --> 28:56.142
relatively minor but still a real thing for

28:56.158 --> 28:59.494
the next couple of weeks, it's up to you all to figure this

28:59.534 --> 29:03.486
out. And then let's check in and see how that went a couple of

29:03.510 --> 29:07.502
weeks down the road. Were the decisions good? Were they not? How did it feel?

29:07.598 --> 29:11.446
Were you missing information that you needed to be able to make these decisions?

29:11.590 --> 29:15.662
And you start to, I think, get a much more textured

29:15.758 --> 29:19.598
view of what it will require for a team to step into

29:19.646 --> 29:23.434
that empowerment. And that is one of those things that

29:23.734 --> 29:28.022
in the OS canvas, we have definitely learned there are some kind

29:28.038 --> 29:31.854
of order of operations that matter because one

29:31.934 --> 29:35.222
version that I have seen go poorly is

29:35.238 --> 29:38.942
that a team or an organization decides they want to do a bunch of authority

29:38.998 --> 29:42.310
work and they want to push a bunch of authority out into the teams.

29:42.382 --> 29:45.990
Sounds great, but they haven't done anything yet around

29:46.062 --> 29:50.046
information. So they have essentially pushed a bunch of authority

29:50.110 --> 29:53.734
into teams that don't have access to the information that they need

29:53.774 --> 29:57.288
to make those good decisions. Inevitably, the teams

29:57.336 --> 30:00.944
make not great decisions because they didn't have access to information.

30:01.104 --> 30:04.880
And then the takeaway is like, well, we tried empowering teams and look what

30:04.912 --> 30:09.296
happened. Like, that went really poorly. So what

30:09.320 --> 30:13.056
I would offer is, well, let's do, let's make sure we have

30:13.240 --> 30:17.216
an information landscape or approach or system that

30:17.240 --> 30:21.048
is actually providing the information that teams need to make these decisions.

30:21.096 --> 30:24.628
Once we have that in place, great, now let's play with some authority

30:24.776 --> 30:28.264
and we'll calibrate both of those over time

30:28.604 --> 30:32.184
to build the reps and then information before

30:33.044 --> 30:36.524
authority. Great. What do you personally enjoy about your work?

30:36.564 --> 30:38.664
The most? So many things.

30:39.804 --> 30:43.372
I often unironically talk about this being

30:43.428 --> 30:47.108
my dream job, my dream work, and I think it's the fact

30:47.156 --> 30:50.980
that it's a combination of a bunch of different things that I

30:51.052 --> 30:54.850
like to do and have either grown to be

30:54.962 --> 30:58.682
okay at or just am inherently inclined

30:58.738 --> 31:02.546
to do that type of work. So what I'm talking about is

31:02.570 --> 31:05.658
that I do really love,

31:05.786 --> 31:09.506
kind of the workshop environment with

31:09.650 --> 31:13.570
30 people in a room. We're here to do a thing that we have designed.

31:13.642 --> 31:17.114
It's a combination of sharing some content, but then just getting

31:17.154 --> 31:21.210
into the work together. And that, I think, taps into my early

31:21.282 --> 31:25.154
career of teaching. I always really enjoyed the act

31:25.194 --> 31:28.882
of teaching, although I had major kind

31:28.898 --> 31:32.610
of design qualms with the way a

31:32.682 --> 31:35.938
typical public high school in the United States is run.

31:36.026 --> 31:39.506
But the actual act of teaching, being in front of the class and doing that

31:39.530 --> 31:42.826
stuff, I love that, and I get to do some of that at the

31:42.850 --> 31:46.186
ready with this work. But it's not every day. That was my main thing I

31:46.210 --> 31:50.194
discovered with teaching, is that, oh, this is basically an eight hour performance

31:50.354 --> 31:54.686
every day, and I am deeply, deeply introverted,

31:54.830 --> 31:58.366
which means I had no time to ever recharge. So at the ready, you know,

31:58.390 --> 32:01.950
we're doing those workshops, but it's, you know, at most, maybe two days

32:01.982 --> 32:04.766
a week. A day a week. You know, go weeks at a time where you're

32:04.790 --> 32:08.334
not doing that and then in the other. So when you're not doing those workshop

32:08.374 --> 32:11.758
type things, then you're working with teams and you're in that coach

32:11.886 --> 32:15.462
mentality. And I spent a lot

32:15.478 --> 32:18.118
of time playing sports growing up,

32:18.286 --> 32:22.048
experiencing coaching from the other side of it.

32:22.096 --> 32:25.288
And then when I graduated college, I did some

32:25.416 --> 32:28.904
ice hockey coaching that I really enjoyed. So I guess I like the

32:28.944 --> 32:32.496
dynamic of helping other people kind

32:32.520 --> 32:35.440
of just step into their own potential.

32:35.632 --> 32:38.792
It's very rarely that I'm teaching that.

32:38.808 --> 32:42.104
We're teaching people a bunch of things that they don't already know. It's more about

32:42.184 --> 32:45.480
kind of building the scaffolding for folks to step into new ways

32:45.512 --> 32:48.796
of being at work. And that's always fun. You know,

32:48.820 --> 32:52.224
at the end of the day, whether we have changed an organization

32:52.524 --> 32:56.540
fundamentally or not, there's so many things outside of our control. Like, I won't sit

32:56.572 --> 33:00.344
here and say, like, every project that ready has ever done has drastically

33:01.444 --> 33:04.676
changed the reality of every organization we've touched. Like, no. Like,

33:04.700 --> 33:07.820
we have some amazing things that we have done. There have been some projects that,

33:07.852 --> 33:09.580
you know, at the end of the day, I don't know if you could even

33:09.612 --> 33:13.052
tell that the ready was there. And I think that's just the truth of doing

33:13.108 --> 33:16.556
this type of work. But the people that you interact with and

33:16.580 --> 33:19.272
how the impact that it has on them.

33:19.468 --> 33:23.376
That is what kind of keeps me coming back to

33:23.400 --> 33:27.576
it. There are plenty of people who have had life changing experiences

33:27.640 --> 33:31.304
realizing that there are roles that they can play within their

33:31.344 --> 33:34.568
organizations or the way that they can change how

33:34.656 --> 33:39.096
their organization actually works. And that's

33:39.120 --> 33:42.512
what I love seeing that turn on for people, I guess,

33:42.528 --> 33:45.976
that has a life outside of the organization they're in currently. When they move roles

33:46.000 --> 33:48.564
and they move to a new organization, they take that with them.

33:48.994 --> 33:52.706
Totally, totally. And that's, you know, and that's, I think,

33:52.730 --> 33:56.170
a conversation we often have very honestly with

33:56.202 --> 33:59.618
organizations thinking about hiring us, which is, you know, we're going to get to

33:59.626 --> 34:03.010
a point where there will always, there will be like this,

34:03.042 --> 34:05.666
you know, do we want to do this for real or not? And just so

34:05.690 --> 34:09.442
you're aware, like, once you have started this work and you have awakened certain

34:09.498 --> 34:12.786
people to the possibility that things could be

34:12.810 --> 34:16.362
better, and they realize that things, you know, could, could be better,

34:16.498 --> 34:20.458
you run the risk of them leaving if the work stalls out,

34:20.546 --> 34:24.090
because they will, you know, they will want to take

34:24.122 --> 34:27.658
this to other places. They will want to find other places.

34:27.826 --> 34:31.162
And so just be aware of that ahead of

34:31.178 --> 34:34.402
time. Like, it's a very real thing. So, like, let's do it so

34:34.418 --> 34:37.850
that they don't actually leave and they can feel like they can continue

34:37.922 --> 34:41.258
having the impact that they. That they want to have. Yeah, it's really important,

34:41.306 --> 34:44.650
isn't it? It's that getting that informed consent from clients so they actually

34:44.722 --> 34:48.066
genuinely know what they're buying into that's really important.

34:48.250 --> 34:52.234
Mentioned contracting a few times. So is it sort of, do you contract

34:52.394 --> 34:55.450
before you get started and then continue to contract throughout the

34:55.482 --> 34:59.974
work? Do you? Totally, yeah. Contracting is an ongoing conversation.

35:00.554 --> 35:04.362
You know, early on, it's like literally the contract that we are signing,

35:04.418 --> 35:07.658
but then ongoing, like, what is the work that we are doing

35:07.706 --> 35:10.954
together? What is the steering that needs to happen based

35:10.994 --> 35:14.194
on how things are going? What do we expect from you?

35:14.234 --> 35:18.160
What are you expecting from us? Are we. No hidden resentments about

35:18.192 --> 35:22.352
how things are going. We try to really have that open dialogue

35:22.408 --> 35:26.312
throughout the entire project to make sure we're always steering

35:26.368 --> 35:29.904
toward the outcomes that matter most to them. That,

35:29.944 --> 35:33.528
at the end of the day, is what we are trying to do. Not perfectly

35:33.576 --> 35:37.312
hit what we wrote into a contract six months earlier,

35:37.408 --> 35:41.160
but let's make sure we are always doing the most important work.

35:41.272 --> 35:44.600
Brilliant. On the flip side, what do you find most challenging about the work

35:44.632 --> 35:47.728
you do? I mean, also, this work is not for the faint of heart,

35:47.776 --> 35:51.368
is it? No, totally. I mean,

35:51.536 --> 35:54.924
there are lots of difficult people in organizations.

35:55.384 --> 35:59.160
Smart, difficult people. Yeah. And this work

35:59.232 --> 36:03.164
often has a way of bringing them out of the woodwork.

36:03.544 --> 36:07.784
And on the one hand, in most large organizations,

36:07.824 --> 36:11.304
we early on in a project, don't get too worried about

36:11.344 --> 36:14.660
the naysayers. Like, there's always, there's so much

36:14.692 --> 36:18.940
work to be done, and very rarely are they such a bottleneck

36:19.012 --> 36:22.596
that we have to directly address that. And that

36:22.620 --> 36:26.084
is fine. I think early in my career, I way over focused on

36:26.124 --> 36:29.316
anybody who had a negative take on what we were trying to do.

36:29.420 --> 36:32.412
How do I convince you that this is the right thing to do now?

36:32.508 --> 36:36.676
I just don't worry about it because often they come around on

36:36.700 --> 36:40.264
their own as the work actually starts to show evidence.

36:40.604 --> 36:43.876
Then they have gone on their own journey to kind of

36:43.900 --> 36:47.012
see the benefit of it. And I no longer. We no longer need to have,

36:47.028 --> 36:50.812
like, this head to head battle. That being said, though, there's lots. I mean,

36:50.908 --> 36:53.764
organizations are filled with assholes. Like, we know this.

36:53.804 --> 36:57.380
Like, many large organizations are filled with assholes and nobody likes dealing

36:57.412 --> 37:01.004
with assholes. So there's that element

37:01.084 --> 37:04.516
of it, for sure. And then I think sometimes, I do

37:04.620 --> 37:08.712
always say that our organizations, the operating

37:08.768 --> 37:11.896
systems in our organizations, they were created by people,

37:12.080 --> 37:16.008
so therefore we can also change them. Because sometimes

37:16.056 --> 37:20.152
I think they feel monolithic, they feel prehistoric.

37:20.208 --> 37:23.824
They feel like they are just like a thing that has existed and will

37:23.864 --> 37:27.136
always exist, put here on this planet by some

37:27.200 --> 37:30.684
entity outside of us. And we just have to take it.

37:31.644 --> 37:35.228
Even though I say those things about, yes, we can change it,

37:35.276 --> 37:38.492
sometimes it really feels like we can't. Right? Like, things are

37:38.548 --> 37:41.756
so convoluted, they are so bureaucratic, they are so

37:41.820 --> 37:45.412
interconnected. You can, I think it's easy to

37:45.468 --> 37:49.224
get into a kind of cynical view

37:49.644 --> 37:53.292
about organizations and what you can actually do to change

37:53.348 --> 37:56.692
them. That's, I think, especially true for the largest

37:56.748 --> 38:00.408
organizations in the world. And I think my

38:00.496 --> 38:03.216
cope, I don't know if it's a coping mechanism or just approach to it,

38:03.240 --> 38:06.888
has been to narrow the focus, the teams,

38:06.976 --> 38:09.944
the department, the division that we are working in.

38:10.104 --> 38:13.768
Let's just focus as hard as we can on that, knowing that there's so much

38:13.816 --> 38:16.840
outside of that that we don't have control over.

38:16.992 --> 38:21.240
And there could be a decision made by the C suite next week that eliminates

38:21.272 --> 38:24.780
this project that we are doing and that I have lived that life.

38:24.952 --> 38:28.180
But that's okay. Let's just focus in on the people

38:28.252 --> 38:32.300
we are touching every day and make sure that the work has

38:32.332 --> 38:36.508
a sense of momentum and progress in

38:36.516 --> 38:39.756
the places where we actually. Are you touching on some interesting things?

38:39.940 --> 38:43.024
What are problems and also what are patterns as well.

38:43.404 --> 38:46.772
You talked about in your most recent podcast about the big return to office.

38:46.828 --> 38:50.012
Now, this is a conversation that's been had all the time here, isn't it,

38:50.028 --> 38:53.268
Dan? At the moment, you talked about

38:53.276 --> 38:57.036
the fact that it's really that organizations are asking the wrong question. It's not necessarily

38:57.060 --> 38:59.944
about returning to the office. It's about something else.

39:00.284 --> 39:03.820
How do you help organizations actually understand that they are asking the wrong

39:03.892 --> 39:08.108
question and it's actually something else? This might be a proxy for something deeper

39:08.156 --> 39:12.104
that needs to be worked through. Yeah, that's a good question.

39:13.364 --> 39:17.068
I think a lot of our work is about

39:17.156 --> 39:20.932
creating time and space to have

39:21.028 --> 39:24.468
these conversations and basically to have the

39:24.556 --> 39:27.732
questions that will provoke

39:27.828 --> 39:31.404
kind of that deeper thinking about what we're actually trying

39:31.444 --> 39:35.316
to do. I think so much of how people experience

39:35.420 --> 39:38.964
their organizations is colored by an incredible

39:39.044 --> 39:42.476
sense of urgency all the time. And some

39:42.500 --> 39:46.584
of it is righteous and some of it is extremely manufactured.

39:47.004 --> 39:50.188
But the end result is that when everything feels urgent,

39:50.236 --> 39:54.470
then the kind of most obvious answer

39:54.502 --> 39:57.974
or the most obvious problem in front of you is what we hyper fixate

39:58.014 --> 40:01.902
on, and then we take the most surface level, take on whatever that

40:01.958 --> 40:06.542
thing is. So a lot of our moments

40:06.638 --> 40:10.206
that we have with clients is trying to, within this

40:10.350 --> 40:14.550
kind of constellation of urgency, create moments

40:14.582 --> 40:18.160
of calm moments where we can take a breath

40:18.232 --> 40:21.728
and look at what else is going on, be provoked

40:21.776 --> 40:25.792
by a couple of deep questions that get you thinking a little bit differently

40:25.928 --> 40:29.336
and start to have that conversation and

40:29.360 --> 40:32.768
be okay with the idea that we're not going to solve this in 160 minutes

40:32.816 --> 40:37.024
session. 190 minutes session. What we have done is start a

40:37.064 --> 40:40.444
conversation that we will hopefully continue

40:40.744 --> 40:44.684
over the coming days and weeks and start to build a more

40:45.734 --> 40:49.366
nuanced sense of what is actually going on here. And part of

40:49.390 --> 40:53.462
that is the introduction of things like understanding

40:53.478 --> 40:57.430
that this is a complex system and what it means for a

40:57.462 --> 41:01.034
complex system versus a complicated system.

41:01.774 --> 41:05.934
Talking about the idea of an operating system and ways

41:05.974 --> 41:09.406
to perceive what your operating system is and what

41:09.430 --> 41:12.824
it could be instead. So there is that kind of sprinkling of

41:12.904 --> 41:16.280
new metaphor analogy content that helps

41:16.312 --> 41:19.856
give people the language and the concepts to

41:20.000 --> 41:22.912
look at things in a little bit different way. When you walk away from a

41:22.928 --> 41:26.000
client, how do you measure success? How do you know you've come away

41:26.032 --> 41:29.600
doing a good job? Yeah. So we've

41:29.632 --> 41:32.952
developed a bunch of internal what we

41:32.968 --> 41:36.448
call our insights work, which are really survey based

41:36.536 --> 41:40.078
around all sorts of things. We have modules

41:40.166 --> 41:43.974
around how much time are people spending in

41:44.014 --> 41:47.314
meetings? How valuable do those meetings feel?

41:47.734 --> 41:51.614
How much time are they spending getting buy in from

41:51.654 --> 41:55.654
stakeholders, those various measures of

41:55.814 --> 41:59.834
inefficiencies within an organization? So we'll do

42:00.254 --> 42:03.534
a pretest on that at the beginning of a project. We'll take

42:03.654 --> 42:07.396
pulses throughout a project, and almost always we'll see

42:07.580 --> 42:11.620
kind of drastic improvement on those sorts of things overall.

42:11.732 --> 42:15.412
So that's kind of like a really just straightforward measure of

42:15.548 --> 42:18.844
success. The more important measure

42:18.884 --> 42:22.652
of success is when I talk to

42:22.828 --> 42:26.756
one of our partners a year after we've worked with them or two

42:26.820 --> 42:30.252
years after we've worked with them, they talk about

42:30.308 --> 42:33.964
how the work is continuing and how the stuff that we had started

42:34.124 --> 42:37.756
looks very different now because they have truly internalized

42:37.820 --> 42:42.004
it. There is still an ongoing conversation, an ongoing

42:42.084 --> 42:45.724
body of work related to the stuff that we were doing

42:45.804 --> 42:49.284
together, and that's ultimately what we're trying to do.

42:49.324 --> 42:53.068
Like I said at the beginning, it's not about getting to some kind of predetermined

42:53.116 --> 42:56.804
end state. It's about starting this kind of self

42:56.884 --> 43:00.412
renewing process of the organization, being able to just do this

43:00.468 --> 43:04.016
work for itself. And if we've been able to successfully do that,

43:04.140 --> 43:07.496
then that's the main thing. And what

43:07.520 --> 43:10.936
are some of the biggest lessons you've learned along the way, either about the

43:10.960 --> 43:14.328
organizations, the work yourself, whatever? What kind of things have you

43:14.336 --> 43:17.616
learned along the way? That's a really good question that

43:17.640 --> 43:20.568
I feel like I should have ready made answers for.

43:20.656 --> 43:23.976
But so much of kind

43:24.000 --> 43:27.616
of what comes to mind, I think has such a recency bias to it.

43:27.680 --> 43:31.868
For me, it's like whatever I'm obsessing about right

43:31.916 --> 43:35.228
now is what's coming to mind. So one of

43:35.236 --> 43:38.292
the main things is that, and this has

43:38.348 --> 43:41.424
really been my own growth as a consultant,

43:42.084 --> 43:45.076
I don't need to have answers. And in fact,

43:45.140 --> 43:48.612
the more answers that I bring, it's possible

43:48.708 --> 43:52.652
that I am doing the client a pretty severe disservice.

43:52.828 --> 43:55.964
So I have really tried to lean

43:56.044 --> 43:59.788
into this idea of invitation and co

43:59.836 --> 44:03.790
creation and being a mirror back to

44:03.982 --> 44:07.678
the organization, probably more than I would have

44:07.766 --> 44:12.110
naturally, and at the same time coming back to this idea of polarities,

44:12.262 --> 44:15.606
also being more judicious or more

44:15.670 --> 44:19.942
ready to bring in some tight prescriptions

44:20.038 --> 44:23.718
about what should happen. So can

44:23.766 --> 44:27.574
I hit hard with opinion or fact about my

44:27.614 --> 44:31.732
experience and how things go in an organization and also hold

44:31.788 --> 44:36.324
that space for people to come to their own realizations.

44:36.444 --> 44:39.732
I think I have, at different times in my career,

44:39.908 --> 44:43.836
been too far on either end. And now I'm trying to

44:43.860 --> 44:47.156
do a little bit better job of noticing where I am on

44:47.180 --> 44:51.292
that continuum. Noticing where the client needs me and

44:51.388 --> 44:55.116
matching that a little bit, a little bit better is

44:55.140 --> 44:58.258
the first thing that comes to mind.

44:58.426 --> 45:02.098
And I don't know if I have another better answer

45:02.186 --> 45:05.658
than that. Well, they're so important,

45:05.706 --> 45:08.306
these. We love what you're saying there, actually, because I guess there's part of it

45:08.330 --> 45:11.258
sort of like, that's the whole thing of the self as instrument, isn't it?

45:11.266 --> 45:14.850
It's like really being aware of what's happening in the moment and

45:14.922 --> 45:18.386
often sort of say it's like the highest level of expertise is being

45:18.410 --> 45:22.322
comfortable with not knowing. And particularly when you're working with complex adaptive

45:22.378 --> 45:25.984
systems, there's so much information that presents itself in the room

45:26.154 --> 45:30.164
that if you already have a predetermined view, it shuts down options, doesn't it?

45:30.284 --> 45:33.964
Totally. And I think the valuable role that

45:34.044 --> 45:37.716
I'm seeing myself and my colleagues play is helping

45:37.900 --> 45:41.580
organize the information that is coming in to

45:41.612 --> 45:44.716
us, helping them see the patterns and

45:44.820 --> 45:48.188
hold that pattern up and say, hey, here's the pattern.

45:48.276 --> 45:51.172
What do you all think about this and what should we do about it,

45:51.268 --> 45:54.686
by the way, here are, you know, a, b, and c

45:54.750 --> 45:58.694
things that I have done in other situations like this that

45:58.734 --> 46:01.590
seemed to have helped. But what do you want to do with,

46:01.662 --> 46:04.926
with this? And I think, you know, early on at the

46:04.950 --> 46:08.662
ready, some of our, you know, moments where we have had

46:08.718 --> 46:12.838
mutual firings between us and a client is when there was

46:12.886 --> 46:16.502
a mismatch in the understanding that

46:16.638 --> 46:19.124
we can't do the work for you.

46:19.294 --> 46:22.656
We, you know, we. We are the trainer, but if

46:22.680 --> 46:26.320
we do the push ups, they don't somehow magically turn into you

46:26.352 --> 46:29.984
being stronger. So the best moments, the best

46:30.024 --> 46:34.208
clients are when we have that really tight understanding

46:34.256 --> 46:37.840
for of each other's role and are very happy to

46:37.872 --> 46:41.144
each be playing that role. They're doing the reps. We're there to actually

46:41.224 --> 46:44.736
help them do the reps a little bit better or introduce a

46:44.760 --> 46:48.232
new exercise. Notice that, hey, you're over developing this.

46:48.288 --> 46:52.016
Let's try this other thing. That has

46:52.080 --> 46:55.320
definitely been a major learning for me. Brilliant.

46:55.352 --> 46:58.896
Thank you. So we spend so much time with our clients, with organizations,

46:58.920 --> 47:01.936
helping them learn and develop. How do you invest in your own learning and development?

47:02.000 --> 47:04.576
What does that look like for you at the moment? A ton of reading.

47:04.640 --> 47:08.416
I have always been a pretty voracious

47:08.520 --> 47:12.120
reader. I'm lucky to be a relatively quick reader, so I'm

47:12.152 --> 47:15.652
always, I've always got at least two or three books

47:15.708 --> 47:19.580
going at a time. And earlier,

47:19.732 --> 47:22.980
I would say years ago, 90% of those

47:23.012 --> 47:26.132
would be somewhat work related. I think in the last couple of

47:26.188 --> 47:29.932
years I have shifted my balance towards more

47:30.068 --> 47:33.532
not directly related to organizational

47:33.588 --> 47:37.060
design or development. However, when you have a very

47:37.252 --> 47:41.092
expansive view of what organizations are and how they work,

47:41.148 --> 47:45.296
you find connections to basically everything all

47:45.320 --> 47:48.952
the time. So I do a lot of it through

47:49.128 --> 47:52.976
reading, just being a member of

47:53.040 --> 47:56.368
the ready. People are always sharing interesting things

47:56.456 --> 47:59.824
in slack, sharing books they've read or

47:59.864 --> 48:03.816
articles. So we have a pretty robust, ongoing,

48:03.920 --> 48:08.088
asynchronous conversation around the theory and

48:08.136 --> 48:11.848
concepts of our work and making sense of

48:11.936 --> 48:15.524
it together. So I feel like I do a lot of learning actually

48:15.864 --> 48:19.392
in slack, and maybe at some point I'm still

48:19.408 --> 48:23.408
a recovering PhD student, so the idea of more

48:23.576 --> 48:27.240
traditional or structured learning has kind of lost

48:27.352 --> 48:31.184
its shine for me. But at some point maybe that'll come

48:31.224 --> 48:34.792
back and I'll explore doing something else.

48:34.928 --> 48:38.280
And then last question, because we really want these podcasts to inspire the

48:38.312 --> 48:42.880
next generation of organization development and design practitioners.

48:42.912 --> 48:46.608
Whether it's in house or as consultants coming through, what advice

48:46.656 --> 48:49.768
would you give someone who's either considering a career or is just at

48:49.776 --> 48:53.784
the beginning of it? So I think having curiosity

48:53.904 --> 48:57.728
around the operating system is the main thing.

48:57.816 --> 49:01.496
So it's kind of going a level deeper in

49:01.520 --> 49:05.312
terms of the frustrations that you are feeling at work or seeing

49:05.368 --> 49:08.616
in an organization. The kind of surface level stuff of

49:08.640 --> 49:11.796
what's going on. Oh, Sally and Bill, they don't get along.

49:11.960 --> 49:15.772
And asking yourself like, well, what is happening at the OS

49:15.868 --> 49:19.308
level that is creating the dynamic where Sally and Bill

49:19.396 --> 49:22.620
don't get along, or where every meeting

49:22.732 --> 49:26.692
feels exactly the same, or whatever the tension is that

49:26.788 --> 49:30.284
you're feeling, starting to develop the ability

49:30.364 --> 49:33.940
to go a level or two levels or three levels

49:33.972 --> 49:37.764
deeper to try to understand what is happening, I think is huge

49:37.844 --> 49:41.574
for internal practitioners, for external

49:41.694 --> 49:44.982
practitioners, that's the main thing.

49:45.038 --> 49:48.422
And then I guess the other kind of more practical thing is

49:48.438 --> 49:52.206
that I do think this work requires

49:52.350 --> 49:55.678
facilitation skills, conversation skills,

49:55.726 --> 49:59.526
that I think you only really develop unless you're really lucky

49:59.550 --> 50:03.554
and you guys are intrinsically good at it, you only develop through practice.

50:04.174 --> 50:06.634
So learning, putting yourself in,

50:07.544 --> 50:10.432
in context, where you get to practice,

50:10.488 --> 50:14.320
facilitating, practicing, holding a structure

50:14.392 --> 50:17.656
for a group to have a conversation, I think

50:17.680 --> 50:21.360
that can only help you if you're interested in doing more

50:21.432 --> 50:25.344
work like this. And I think there's probably all sorts of external

50:25.384 --> 50:28.432
trainings to explore. I have never really

50:28.488 --> 50:32.640
done one. My external training was becoming a teacher in undergrad.

50:32.832 --> 50:35.952
Once you've gone through student teaching, you can handle any sort

50:35.968 --> 50:39.360
of organizational environment. So I don't know that I would

50:39.392 --> 50:43.056
recommend that as the most direct approach. There's probably

50:43.120 --> 50:46.808
better ways, but it's primarily a rep based game. Just getting

50:46.856 --> 50:50.704
those reps, being in that kind of facilitator role is

50:50.744 --> 50:54.024
really valuable. Well, thank you so much for your time, Sam. We really

50:54.064 --> 50:57.216
appreciate it. It's been a really enjoyable conversation and there's

50:57.240 --> 50:59.392
so many things we're going to take away from it as well. I think some

50:59.408 --> 51:01.944
of the things I'm sort of taking away besides the fact that you bring brilliant

51:01.984 --> 51:05.272
metaphors like you don't get better from

51:05.288 --> 51:09.456
the trainer doing the push ups. When you think about the operating system, think bat,

51:09.520 --> 51:13.384
which I really liked the importance of, like, don't just

51:13.504 --> 51:17.032
go straight into things, make sure that the ground is ready for it.

51:17.048 --> 51:20.648
So things like, you know, providing information for people, for authority.

51:20.816 --> 51:24.528
Also that many organizations are kind of gripped by urgency and the importance of actually

51:24.576 --> 51:28.200
creating calm and a space for calm and reflection before we move

51:28.232 --> 51:31.776
forward. And also, people wanted to get to the profession, have curiosity

51:31.840 --> 51:36.266
about the operating system and the importance of developing facilitation

51:36.330 --> 51:39.842
skills, as well as a recommendation on

51:39.858 --> 51:43.122
your LinkedIn page that says he's wise, focused and kind. And I think we

51:43.138 --> 51:46.146
definitely agree with that. And also add some more superlatives as well.

51:46.170 --> 51:49.546
So thank you so much, Sam. If anybody wants to reach out

51:49.570 --> 51:53.146
to you and keep that conversation going, or to really access the services

51:53.210 --> 51:56.922
of the ready or access your different interests, your podcasts,

51:57.018 --> 52:00.378
I love your Instagram site, which is the year of the mundane,

52:00.426 --> 52:04.066
is that right? Which I loved. I did that. That's a retired project, but yes,

52:04.170 --> 52:07.962
I did that. What's the best way for people to get hold of you?

52:08.138 --> 52:11.618
The best way is just shoot me an email. I actually, I actually love

52:11.666 --> 52:15.930
receiving email. I don't hate email. It's sameady.com.

52:16.122 --> 52:19.842
i promise to read and likely respond to

52:19.898 --> 52:23.242
anything that lands there. Well, you responded to us, so thank you

52:23.258 --> 52:26.882
so much. That's right. Proof is in the pudding. Proof is

52:26.898 --> 52:30.362
in the podcast. Exactly. Well, thank you so much.

52:30.418 --> 52:33.118
I know that everyone who watches is going to get loads of value from it

52:33.126 --> 52:35.702
as well. So thank you for being so generous with your time, your expertise and

52:35.718 --> 52:38.998
your insights. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. These great,

52:39.046 --> 52:41.134
great questions, great conversation. Thank you.